In the old days, when I was a long-haired hippie (!!!) I used to make my own liquid fertiliser for the organic garden.

Two reasons:

1) it brought all sorts of elements into the top soil (beneficial for plants)

2) the liquid in the barrel often had the most amazing life-forms living in it (especially rat-tailed maggots! – I’ll get into details in a later episode of “Jack’s weird and wonderful world”

Main plants to add to the barrel-with-water:

Weeds!

Weeds grow in your garden because conditions are such that the weeds can flourish simply because they have the nutrients that might be lacking in the soil!!

If you have lots of YARROW it might mean your soil could do with a bit of Phosphorus. Yarrow has deep roots that can grab phosphorus from way down in the soil and “bring it up”. Mind you it also has good amounts of Potash, plus the trace elements of copper and sulphur.

COMFREY does a similar deep mining of the soil: it gets potash up to the surface.

I have a lot of NETTLE in my garden – a sign of Nitrogen being leached out, probably because of sloping conditions of the soil. But the yellow and red admiral butterflies love the nettle for their caterpillars.

Other useful weeds: Dandelion, fat hen, borage, dock, plantain, tansy, sow-thistles, and that awful Cleaver

For extra nutrients grab some fresh chicken poo (Nitrogen!)

Barrel with water and all the weeds you can find; soak them in there for a few weeks so it all breaks down nicely – this often starts becoming quite smelly (maybe put a lid on?) and will be ready when it has become a nice yucky sludge.

In cooler weather it’ll take a lot longer to create a barrel of fertiliser.

Now, delivery of the stuff is tricky: you don’t really want to use the “raw” stuff, but dilute perhaps 1 in 10, so you get a nice, light tea brew that won’t burn the roots of the plants

If you live near the coast: grab some seaweed too as that’s usually full of extra minerals that work well in the “trace elements department”

Personally I have given up making liquid fertilisers (lack of time, really)… as there is some very efficient stuff on the market that works brilliantly.

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