Attempt at making fish hydrolysate fertiliser at home


I have been doing compost tea regularly, it's a great way to extend coverage of your vermicompost. But I'm missing an ingredient that seems to be very popular with making fungal dominant compost tea: fish hydrolysate (fish amino acid). The reason was I didn't want to spend more money on this pretty expensive liquid.

So today I thought I could try and make my own. I regularly go fishing and last season I brought back some bait fish that I was going to use but never got around to do it, there were some fish that we also forgot in the freezer. So I have my main ingredient, the fish :-). Most recipes are also using a lacto bacillus serum to break down the fish using enzyme, but I don't have any (this is another project for the future). But I have seen some videos of people using just compost, molasses and a bit of yeast and I have all those ingredient at hand, replacing compost with worm compost. So I'm giving it a try.

So I added old frozen Bream, Flathead and Yellow Tail Scad in a plastic container. Then I went harvesting some vermicompost from Quasimodo, my wooden worm box and collected about 10 Litres (2.6 gallons).

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The worm compost was added to the container with the fish in it. I then added half a tea spoon of yeast and 250ml (about 1 cup) of molasses that I disolved in 2L of rain water. I added more water to fill about 2/3 of the container.

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The container was then covered a paint strainer material to keep bugs away and create a little gap when I will cover it for air to come in.

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I then used a 5 L bucket which fits very nicely into the container. The bucket is used to hold Zeolite rock dust but it will do just well as a lid for my project.

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With the bucket on top, there is just enough gap for air to get in but that will keep the flies at bay. After the whole night, I went and check the setup and there was no bad smell, I could only smell molasses. There were small bubbles, so I guess the fermentation has started?

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I will now have to wait about 2 weeks to a month for the process to complete. I will stir up the stuff every evening after work to aerate a bit. Fingers crossed.

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