Gardening without animal fertilisers

[SarrissUK]

Worms are not exploited because they are eating and pooping lol They eat, and therefore they poop. If it wasn't for wormeries, they wouldn't be alive!

[rambleberry]

Has this article been mentioned yet?
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...-animal-manure

I have to say, I was a bit dismissive of the concept until I read this article, but the yield improvements cited are pretty impressive. I hope someone does some more research into this.

[SarrissUK]

That's a very interesting article Rambleberry - I'd never heard of biocyclic vegan standards or this type of compost, but that sounds great! I'd be happy to use that too, and I'm not vegan!

I do respect those that don't want to eat meat, or use products that have touched upon animals' lives, I really do. I just find that the lines are blurred where it begins and ends and it's like you say... it's a personal choice. Personally I have no problems with animal manure, but I'm also keen to hear about other products like this one! That sounds really exciting

[veggiechicken]

Worms are not exploited because they are eating and pooping lol They eat, and therefore they poop. If it wasn't for wormeries, they wouldn't be alive!

You can apply that argument to cattle, sheep, horses, etc. If it wasn't for farms, meat eaters and horse riders, the animals wouldn't be alive to produce poop.

I haven't eaten meat for 30+ years so I have some sympathy with the Vegans. My questions, to which I haven't had a Vegan answer is...............
Is it better to give a life to a chicken that is about to be killed because its egg production has fallen - or to let it be slaughtered?
Having rehomed said chickens what should we do with the occasional egg that they lay? If you can't eat it because you're vegan??
Thirdly, having rescued these chickens, given them a happy life, what do you do with the poop that they produce? I can't believe that a vegan would send it to landfill?

Too many questions and I'm waiting for the OP to tell us his views.

[toomanytommytoes]

Bit dubious of the claims about that compost. Why would it be different to any other compost? All compost feeds for more than one year as it is gradually broken down by the soil food web: only a portion of the total nitrogen is available to plants in the first year after application.

Most of the evidence in the article is anecdotal rather than scientific. No link to the peer reviewed scientific study is provided (I found it with a bit of Googling - https://www.researchgate.net/publica...moea_batatas_L). The compost producer's daughter is the first name in the list of authors for the study...no conflict of interest there!

The key conclusion of the study...

The big difference in yield between sweet potato grown in humus soil and sweet potato treated conventionally probably is related to the fact that the structure of soil which is a clay loam soil was too compact for the cultivation of sweet potato, a disadvantage which has been compensated by using humus soil as substrate while substituting soil.

...which makes it sound like any compost would have had the same effect.

[toastiesmurf]

Each to their own, absolutely. Fair play anyone who goes all the way with it...

I love eggs...

[seasprout]

Vegan gardening

This is a link to a recent podcast interview with the author of the recently released book on vegan gardening.

https://rootsandall.co.uk/portfolio-...tthew-appleby/

It is very interesting and should answer most of your questions.
I’m not endorsing anything there just passing on info.

[seasprout]

I found all the comments on there very interesting Still didn’t manage to find a compost though and still searching but most appear to have a lot of animal fertilisers in them. I have however this year found a vegan and organic soil improver, but not too sure what it will be like in the soil so looking for something else too.

Mark, there is only one vegan approved compost available... it’s here. https://www.fertilefibre.com/compost...e-compost.html

Apologies if you already know about it...

[toomanytommytoes]

Mark, there is only one vegan approved compost available... it’s here. https://www.fertilefibre.com/compost...e-compost.html

Apologies if you already know about it...

Ouch...that stuff is pretty dear! Wonder how many other composts are vegan but just not Vegan Society approved? Seems it's just a mix of coir, composted bark, bark chips, vermiculite and loam. You'd be better off buying individual components yourself. You could make a good potting mix with composted bark, coir, perlite and some sort of vegan fertiliser. Probably easier just to buy the New Horizon stuff though.

[MarkHackwell]

You can apply that argument to cattle, sheep, horses, etc. If it wasn't for farms, meat eaters and horse riders, the animals wouldn't be alive to produce poop.

I haven't eaten meat for 30+ years so I have some sympathy with the Vegans. My questions, to which I haven't had a Vegan answer is...............
Is it better to give a life to a chicken that is about to be killed because its egg production has fallen - or to let it be slaughtered?
I would give a life to it, I wouldn’t have any problems keeping pets in general

Having rehomed said chickens what should we do with the occasional egg that they lay? If you can't eat it because you're vegan??
I would give it to someone else, it’s a little easier for me as I don’t like eggs

Thirdly, having rescued these chickens, given them a happy life, what do you do with the poop that they produce?
I can't believe that a vegan would send it to landfill? I would find someone else to use it, as I know not everyone would follow my path

..........................................

[MarkHackwell]

Ouch...that stuff is pretty dear! Wonder how many other composts are vegan but just not Vegan Society approved? Seems it's just a mix of coir, composted bark, bark chips, vermiculite and loam. You'd be better off buying individual components yourself. You could make a good potting mix with composted bark, coir, perlite and some sort of vegan fertiliser. Probably easier just to buy the New Horizon stuff though.

An Update to everyone, I have also found another compost that is ‘free from Animal By Products’ as they put it. Its called Sylvagrow Melrose Compost which is Sustainable I will give it a shot when I can get some and report back.

[mrmauy]

Do you have any craft breweries near by? FYM seems to be expensive near me so I have arranged with a local vegan brewery to take some of their spent grain (for compost/mulch) and spent hops (for mulch) gratis.

You would probably need to add brown to the compost (and there is the worry of rats) but could be a viable alternative as would likely be available in large volume.

[Teds Mum]

This is one of those areas where the "possible and practicable" caveat comes into play. Avoiding all animal products to the extreme is often more ethically harmful - I'm thinking synthetic materials/ microfibres and plastics here. I for one would sooner rescue a chicken and use it's poop as fertiliser than see it killed. You can always feed the eggs to others if you don't want to eat them. Ted quite enjoys eggs :-)

[Squingy]

It's pretty close to being one, nowadays, I think. It used to be cool for 'celebst' o be Vegetarian, and now it's cool to be Vegan
Meat eating was the thing to avoid, to save humankind, now we have to avoid dairy and eggs as well, to save the planet.
I don't necessarily agree that this makes for a healthier/more sustainable diet for humans, but each to their own eh?

Thelma, I was surprised to learn adult milk drinking is a relatively new thing, adult humans only started 7,500 years ago. As a former dietician we liked to cram milk down people's throats (metaphorically speaking) because, speaking plainly, it had such a wide variety of nutrients it 'fit into' meal plans, much to the joy of dairy companies, and then a big part of a food group. But human adults never always had to drink milk.

Veganism or vegetarianism isn't some kind of craze people jump onto because it is cool or the latest fad. For a lot of people it's philosophical and a way of life. The low fat diets etc would fit into what you describe but I don't believe vegetarianism or veganism do.

[Trouvere]

Well, let me place my tongue very firmly in my cheek, and throw around some figures obtained in a few seconds' googling with wild and careless abandon.

1 cow provides calories equivalent to 6 months intake for an adult human. It might naturally expect to live for 20 years, but will instead be slaughtered at about age 3. If I ate nothing but beef my entire life, I would be responsible for the deaths of perhaps 120 cows, or 2040 years of lost animal life.

I am naturally not going to eat cows raised on corn trucked to desert feedlots, because I am not insane. No, my cows will run at low density in pleasant meadows, whose biodiversity will in fact be measurably increased by their grazing and dung-depositing.

Meanwhile, to obtain equivalent calories to a cow from, say, wheat, I need to harvest about 1/30th of a hectare, or about 4 hectares in a lifetime. There are approximately 300 rodents per hectare, pretty much all of which will die on harvest, so that's 1200 rodents on my conscience. They'd potentially live 1 to 3 years otherwise, so that's perhaps 2400 years of lost animal life. That's before factoring in the loss of biodiversity across a monoculture wheat field.

Also meanwhile, and now my tongue is getting cramp, a blue whale provides 150 times as much meat as a cow, so just 1 blue whale would do me for a lifetime of extremely boring meals. If I slaughter that whale just as it reaches adult weight at age 10, I cost it perhaps 70 years of future life. But that whale would have eaten 40 million krill per day, so effectively, I have also saved the lives of almost precisely 1 trillion krill - and krill, remarkably, can live for 10 years, so I am actually now ahead by 10 trillion years of animal life, an enormous karmic upside if ever there was one.

Of course, there are 900 million cattle in the world and only 12,000 blue whales, so... better get in quick.