Easy Homemade Fish Fertilizers and How to Use Them?

Fish fertilizer is often recommended by gardeners to amend your garden soil with organic materials. Fish Fertilizer is an all-organic fertilizer packed with enough macrominerals Nitrogen and Phosphorus, micro minerals like Calcium, essential fish oil, and amino acids.

Another advantage of using organic fertilizer is that it doesn’t harden the soil structure and decrease soil fertility after each use like chemical fertilizers.

How to prepare and use fish fertilizer at home?

If you’re looking to prepare fish fertilizer, this is what you would need to understand. Fish fertilizer can be prepared in either liquid or granule form.

1. Fish meal is a granular fertilizer produced by decomposing fish and bones for a few weeks. It’s a slow-release fertilizer with a high content of macronutrients. It also provides good bacteria in the soil.
2. Fish emulsion is a concentrated liquid received after processing fish and bones. The heat applied to the mixture decomposes the material into mulch and liquid. After straining out solids, sulfuric acid is added to lower the mixture’s pH. It produces a rancid fish smell, which can attract rodents and pests. Experts suggest using fish emulsion for outdoor purposes only.
3. Fish Hydrolysate is a liquid fish fertilizer packed with essential oil, amino acids, and protein that easily feeds soil microbes. It’s more of whole food for the garden and encourages beneficial microbes and foliar feeding.

DIY Fish Emulsion Preparation

Fish emulsion can easily be prepared at home using fish scraps, brown organic matter, and Sulfuric acid.

Method #1

• A fresh emulsion mixture can be easily made from one-part fresh fish, three-part sawdust, and a bottle of unsulfured molasses.

• You will treat it like any other compost: Add a little water and put the mixture in a container with a lid, stirring and turning it daily for about two weeks until the mixture is broken down.

Method #2

• Fill the bucket about 2/3 of the way full by layering fish scraps and brown organic matter like plant leaves in equal parts. Adding molasses and seaweed is optional.
• Fill the bucket with water to cover all the material; cover it with a lid, and keep it out of the sun.
• Stir the mixture every few days for several weeks.
• Pour off the water and catch it in another bucket. The remains are the fish emulsion. You can use the remaining fish scraps and leaf litter to brew another batch or just put them in your compost pile or worm bin.

How to use Fish Emulsion Fertilizer?

• To use homemade fish emulsion, you first need to dilute the solution.
• Add just 1/2 ounce of fish emulsion to 1 gallon of water. You can use it as a foliar spray to water plants and soil. Because fish emulsion works quickly, you may want to apply it more frequently.
• You may consider fertilizing your lawn every spring with fish emulsion using a hose-end sprayer.

DIY Fish Hydrolysate Preparation

Here is the homemade method to prepare fish hydrolysate.

Method #1

• You can use either fish discards like fish heads, guts, etc., or whole fish. A whole fish has a naturally wider range of nutrients present.
• Cut the fish into smaller chunks, then either blend or run through a meat mincer.  The finer the mince, the more effective the fermentation.

• Put it into a container and then add water. Adding 3 parts water to 1 part ferment material. Works well (1litre fish mince: 3-liter water)
• Always use non-chlorinated water.  Chlorine kills microbes.

• Add 3:1 Fish: Sugar.  Sugarcane molasses or raw (unrefined/ unbleached) sugar is good.
• Add lactobacilli to the blended fish mixture. (Approx.  2tbsp per liter).
• Now you have liquefied fish, sugar, and Lacto.  Pour this mixture into a container to ferment.  Cover with a cloth/ mesh to stop insects, etc. The process takes anywhere from 2 weeks to over a month.
• There is a pungent smell during fermentation, but once completed, there should be little more than a faint vinegar smell.  You can finally transfer it to a smaller container.

How to use Fish Hydroslate?

Like fish emulsion, you can use fish hydrolysate as a foliar spray.

• Before using it, you must shake it well and then mix 2 tablespoons of fertilizer with 1 gallon of water. One gallon will cover 25 sq. ft. of soil.
• It can be difficult to use fish hydrolysate in cold weather, as it becomes gluggy.  Warming the bottle in the sun before decanting help, as does the use of warm water to dilute or mix it with to aid dispersion.

DIY Fish Meal Preparation

Fish meal is basically prepared by using, cooking, and pressing fish scraps inside a container. However, it can be difficult to prepare a fish meal at home that matches a commercial fish meal’s quality.

The granular form is obtained by drying the fish or fish trimmings in the sun and then grinding them. This often results in a poor quality fish meal with low nutrients. The industrial production of fish meal utilizes cooking, pressing, and drying to obtain fine mulch.

To prepare a quality fish meal at home, you’d need commercial equipment and tools.

Method #1

• You’d need items like fish, cooker, press, evaporator, centrifuge, dryer, and grinder.
• Start with cooking the fish to separate solids from water and oil. You’d need a commercial cooker. If the fish used is fatty, it is first pressed to extract most of the fish oil. It’s better to use fish containing not more than 6 percent oil and not more than 4 percent salt.
• Next, you’d need to press the mixture to separate oil, water, and soluble protein from the mixture. This is commonly done in a perforated tube with increasing pressure.
• Take the liquid and remove oil from it by centrifugation process to get a thick syrup-like mixture called “stickwater.”
• Add the stickwater and the press cake together and dry. The drying helps to remove excess moisture.
• last, grind the dried material to get fishmeal with consistent mass.

How to use Fish Meal?

You can scatter pellets or granules onto the ground’s surface and gently work them into the top 1 inch of the soil around plants with a rake. In the end, water them well. While it’s not composted, this fish fertilizer is often used as a soil amendment.

You’d need to introduce fish meal into the soil and properly amend it weeks before planting the seedlings. It may take a while to get dissolved with soil water and take 2 weeks to 4 weeks for the plant roots to absorb it from the soil.

Although it’s a year-round fertilizer, it’s best to add a fish meal in the fall, winter, or early spring to condition the soil. The slow discharge of nutrients (30-60 days) makes it a dependable soil builder and a non-burning nutrient with wide application for many plants.

In Conclusion

Fish fertilizers can easily be prepared at home with minimal organic materials and tools in hand. You can use fresh fish, fish scraps, carcasses, bones, and skin to prepare a nutrient-rich fish fertilizer within a few weeks and immediately start implementing it in your soil to boost plant production.