This unconventional gardening hack may sound fishy, but experienced gardener Ariana Lappini (@cultivatingconfidence) explains why it's the best way to fertilize your soil for next season's crops in her recent video.
The scoop
Lappini buries whole, raw fish heads in the soil where her vegetable garden will be planted next year. You read that right.
"I feel like everyone's going to have an opinion about this … but here we go," started Lappini in a video demonstrating her gutsy gardening hack.
@cultivatingconfidence Burying fish heads and guts in your garden enriches the soil with slow release nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace minerals boosting microbial life and improving structure. To avoid odors or scavengers, bury scraps at least 12" deep and cover the bed well. Give the nutrients time to stabilize before planting directly above. This is an American Indian farming practice that build long term fertility and feed your plants and soil food web from the inside out.
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"Burying fish scraps in my garden this fall to improve soil health," she begins, and explains how she turns over her vegetable garden in preparation for winter.
First, Lappini removes the old crops and digs trenches in the soil, then buries the fish scraps in them. They are not too deep for animals to be able to detect them, so she protects them with a cover of wire fencing, weighing it down with blocks.
How it's helping
There is an old gardening trick that calls for burying dead fish under lemon trees to boost harvests, as Better Homes and Gardens Australia reported — and plenty of other folk wisdom, like the Three Sisters Garden, support Lappini's idea.
"As the fish slowly breaks down and decomposes, it releases three essential nutrients for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium," wrote Rachel Iorfino for Better Homes and Gardens. "And if you're using a whole fish, you will also get trace minerals of calcium, magnesium and other great sources of nourishment."
Gardening with these ancient principles in mind, gardeners can create healthy and productive gardens from nutrient-rich soil just by using their kitchen scraps. Fish fertilizer is less environmentally damaging than synthetic fertilizer, and by burying fish deep in the soil, nutrients are dispersed throughout the soil, as opposed to just sitting on top.
Additionally, this method can save gardeners some serious cash — there's no need to go out and buy it, as fishmongers will often give them away for free. Alternatively, you can use whatever you have laying around to make fruitful plant fertilizer: coffee grinds, yard clippings, or even the water that mozzarella cheese comes in.
These tips make starting a garden — which, no matter how small, is proven to increase happiness, fitness, and benefit the ecosystem — much less intimidating. These kinds of hacks save gardeners time, money, trips to the grocery store, and protect the planet from tons of waste that would otherwise enter landfills.
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Not enough time ⏳ What everyone's saying
"Brilliant idea!" said one commenter.
"This is an American Indian farming technique," another replied.
"This is a great idea," said another TikTok commenter.
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