Growing Gourds

Fish Emulsion Fertilizer

When you are growing gourds, it is important for the gourd vines to be healthy and vibrant.  This helps them resist disease and adverse weather conditions as well and helps them to maximize the envirionment to their best advantage. We have tried Chemical as well as other green fertilizers and have found fish emulsion fertilizer seems to work best under most conditions. If you find a Fish Emulsion and Kelp mixture, these are also great for growing, we have tried both with great success. We are currently using the 5-1-1 Alaskan Fish Emulsion fertilizer shown on the left.

Fish Emulsion fertilizer does not show the high numbers you see on many chemical fertilizers, but from experience, we have found that fish emulsion does seem to work better than most if not all chemical fertilizers and has a hand up on most green fertilizers as well. Fish Emulsion Fertilizers not only provide natural nitrogen and other natural minerals necessary for healthy growth, but they also provide the enzymes that roots need to break down the minerals and convert them into food for the plant.

We have used fish emulsion and kelp mix fertilizers on just about everything we have grown with tremendous results.  The first year we tried it, we had a dozen rows of corn, and the first three rows were in an area where they were not growing weel.  When the rest of the corn had reached 6 ft in height, the corn in these three rows were only about a foot tall and were yellowish and weak looking.  We made a strong foliar spray of fish emulsion fertilizer and sprayed these three rows of corn.  Within two days all the corn in these rows had a rich dark green color to them, and within 10 days they had grown as tall as the healthy stalks.  It was too little too late as the corn had not developed normally, but the response even this late in the season was tremendous and almost unbelievable.

With Fish Emulsion and kelp mix Fertilizer, unlike chemical fertilizers, you cannot burn your crop.  You can water with it, you can use it as a foliar spray, I even spolled a gallon of the undiluted, concentrated fish emulsion fertilizer right on some vegetation, and although it smelled like dead fish, it never burned any of the folage it spilled on, in fact that area flourished well.

We have also tried other fertilizers, and we do like mulching with grass clippings as this also provides nitrogen for growth and keeps your plants healthy, but nothing has worked as well as fish emulsion.  Our most recent experiment was with Bat Guano for nitrogen.  Our current fish emulsion product is 5-1-1 for growing herbs, but for gourds we normally used a 2-1-1, but don't let those small numbers fool you, it is a 2-1-1 with enzymes and the plants will flourish on it.  The Bat guano we tried is a 10-1-1 and after fertilizing with it, the leaves of our herbs spotted and curled from a lack of other nutrients, so we made a double strength batch of Fish Emulsion and within a few days we could see a reversal of the problems the herbs were having.

See also our Organic Fertilizer Page in The Gourd Report #2