Make Your Own Fertilizer

Community Contributed

By Joe Kennedy

Will the price of fertilizer continue to go up? Is importing fertilizers bad for the environment? Yes! Importing fertilizer from thousands of miles away pollutes the environment, and we can make our own. Here are nine ways to make your own fertilizer.

1.    Put sticks and branches parallel in piles to attract geckos, worms, and spiders. All animals and insects make manure.
2.    Make habitat for birds by building perches and roosts, and bird baths.
3.    Attract insects by mulching with newspaper and cardboard.
4.    Find things that hold water and raise toads, fish and water plants. The mulch on the bottom makes great fertilizer.
5.    Grow lots of beans and glycine and then cut them for mulch.
6.    Build the right layers of vegetation and fruit scraps for earthworms. Then use their manure to make a tea to pour on to your plant.
7.    Get dirt from under kiawe trees and put a couple of handfuls in the earthworm tea.
8.    Plant legume trees like monkey pod and kalamungai and keep snapping off their branches for high nitrogen mulch.
9.    Pick up charcoal from the imu and from campfires. Put it into the tea. This makes terrific fertilizer.

There are of course other ways too. Horse, cow and goat manure is great fertilizer. But not everybody wants or is able to keep large animals.