Dead fish as a fertilizer?

Hey guys I do a lot of bowfishing and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to throw some of em I shoot in a hole with soil and move the seedlings there in a month or so.

I used to compost fish. Large, sea faring fish that were sustainably line caught. It took quite a while to break down using a certain composting method. If you're just throwing them i the hole and they have no oxygen to interact with, it will just rot and would probably cause more problems than it would be beneficial. If you composted them and then used that compost to mix in your hole, I would say that is the way to go.

Mix with your growing medium

I think there is an historical precedent

I have a friend that cuts the fish up and blends it in a blender he use's it 4 his vegetable garden. I think he had a bear dig his garden up once.

country94 said:

Hey guys I do a lot of bowfishing and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to throw some of em I shoot in a hole with soil and move the seedlings there in a month or so.

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start a compost pile, and compost them, with other goodies.

i think the idea behind burying fish was leaving the head, tail and bones and to not waste it bury it under the corn. This was probably cooked fish too, so the head and tail wouldnt really rot, and over time the bones would also decompose, just like bonemeal and bloodmeal
if you really wanted i'm sure you could seperate the meat from the bone and dehydrate them and grind them into a powder fertilizer

over a long time the bones would be giving off a slow release of nutrients, mostly nitrogen i think. Land back when the natives were here was much more fertile, i read in a book a cubic foot of healthy soil would have 50+ worms in it, in "teaming with microbes."

bottom line is i think if you did this once a year , that it could be beneficial.
also i've heard yearly applications of eggshells are good

You could also make some fish emulsion with it, works well as foliage spray, quick N boost.

http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/organic/2002080041031662.html

Sativied said:

You could also make some fish emulsion with it, works well as foliage spray, quick N boost.

http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/organic/2002080041031662.html

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Thank you! I was looking for a spray on nitrogen source

those plants will taste like fish . if I pore a glass of wine into the soil the next day I can smell it in the buds .

Boil it and add some banana peels. Then you can filter out the solids and compost them and use the liquid for feeding.

thanks everybody!

There is something very fishy about this thread
So let's boil them for their oil and feed 'em to the plants
Don't spare the dung.

Putting raw fish head n such in ground,can act as gopher repellant as well. Old Mexican farmer trick. Lol