Farm made biostimulant from seaweed?

[JohnGalway]

Hi folks,

Attending biofarm 2019 here, some very interesting and useful presentations. One thing Dr Christine Jones mentioned was use of biostimulants. A lot is above my understanding right now, but she mentioned seaweed and even saltwater in that capacity. Fermented seaweed also got a mention.

Queston I have is has anyone here made their own biostimulants from seaweed/salt water. I have a number of land parcels on the coast.

Thanks.

 

[ploughman1963]

@Kiwi Pete

 

[Dolerite]

Hi folks,

Attending biofarm 2019 here, some very interesting and useful presentations. One thing Dr Christine Jones mentioned was use of biostimulants. A lot is above my understanding right now, but she mentioned seaweed and even saltwater in that capacity. Fermented seaweed also got a mention.

Queston I have is has anyone here made their own biostimulants from seaweed/salt water. I have a number of land parcels on the coast.

Thanks.

Hello John.
I've made some seaweed solution just by putting kelp into an ibc container and topping up with untreated well water and diluting it at 20 or 19 to 1 and spraying it on grassland that way.
Occasionally I mix in molasses about 10 litres into a 600 litre spray tank.

I've sprayed on diluted seawater at the same rate 20:1 at 4 litres per acre.
Tbh it was hit and miss with results.

However lately I've been reading JADAM Organic Farming by Youngsan Cho. He goes through on how to make microbial mixes, liquid fertilizer and natural pesticides.
His liquid fertilizers most of them use sea salt or sea water.
The JADAM microorganism solution the starter on how to set the soil up for instance, uses leaf mold soil, boiled potatoes and sea salt. There's a very narrow window of hours between when it's made and the microbes are at the optimum and can be sprayed onto soil and a few hours later the microbes would be dead and you can only use it as fertilizer and then you need to add fermented grass and sea water to it and even add a water softening solution.

But with the bacterial solutions he advises spraying on a dull day directly ahead of rain.
And sure enough looking back my best results with the diluted seawater came on dull days just ahead of rain or when it was raining.

It's a good book to start on. It'll give some confidence to what you're doing.
Pricey at over €40 but if some of the recipes work then it'll be worth it.

It should help with mineral supplementation too.