Seaweed feed for plants

Whilst I love wildflowers, I am also fortunate enough to have lovely plants growing at home. I am forever taking cuttings in the hope that these cuttings will grow into healthy plants. For years, I used BabyBio to feed my plants, but my son’s dog Mango developed a taste for them and would eat the tube, including the plastic tube.

I started making my own fertiliser, blitzing together banana peels and egg shells. But this concoction attracted flies and ants. So I started doing some research and tried seaweed. You can actually buy seaweed feeds in garden centres and on Amazon. Buy why bother buying, when I can easily make my own.

Several websites suggest drying the seaweed out, tilled into garden, mixed into compost bins, laid as mulch, or made into DIY seaweed fertilizer tea or powder. I played around with that, and with various other ways in my kitchen, before settling for the formula that I think delivers most goodies to my plants.

Research showed that feeding tomato plants with a seaweed extract increased the yield of tomatoes; seaweed extract supposedly increases the photosynthetic capability of leaves as well as improves the soil. You can read the academic article here. I used a mix of green, red and brown seaweeds. I guess it is like feeding the green babies a healthy, balanced diet of the best food! 

I soak the freshly collected seaweed in mineral water for a day or so and then blend, sieve and feed the liquid to my green babies. I use 200g of wet seaweed, blended with enough water to make a concentrate, and then dilute the concentrate up to 3 litres. The bits on the sieve can also be mixed with water and used as feed too.

By using wet seaweed, I preserve the nutrients that may have been lost through the drying process. Soaking the seaweed for a day or two allows the seaweed to decompose a bit, releasing their essence into the water that then gets absorbed by the soil.