Making liquid bone meal

If this has already been addressed please link me, and I'll delete this.
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I'm a big fan of Nectar nutrients Herculean Harvest. As I understand it liquid bone meal is not labor intensive or difficult to produce.

I cannot afford to continue buying the 5 gallon buckets of herc. harvest, and would like to make my own.

Is there a way to measure my concentration of npk after producing the liquid nutrient? Send it to a testing lab or buy a meter, I just need help sorting through the available information and selecting an option.

Also, does anyone have tips for storing it? I imagine it's going to rot without some sort of lime or preservative, and I prefer to make large quantities for storage.

I appreciate any help, and perhaps this spawns some ideas or discussion.

Thanks!

Bone meal has cal/mag/phosphorus in them. If you use any FRESH bone stock you will get marrow and nitrogen along with your calcium magnesium and phosphorus.

You will need to grind it up and mix it with some aerobic or other bukashi mixture to get a stable jar-able product. You may want to boil the mixture before to sanitize your and soften the product before introducing an aerobic bacterial inoculant. The hard part about the process. is making sure you have enough but, no too much organic matter in your "soup". too much and it wont turn out correct, too little and mixer will be too week. G/L!

I wished someone would chime in on proportions..

I'm going to use premade bone meal. I also found fish, bone meal as well which limits the risk of bovine diseases.

It seems that it is extremely difficult to burn plants with liquid bone meal. You can put as much as 4/5 tablespoons per gallon on flowering plants and it produces very large yields without burning.

You'll get a cake layer of bone meal on the top of the dirt. You've got scrape it and use hygrozyme to try to break it down or the cake gets so thick water runs around it and down the sides of the pot.

I'll post up my recipe when I've experimented a bit more.

Dmannn said:

I wished someone would chime in on proportions..

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Is bone meal 100% water soluble? If not anybody try a "brew bag"?

I think you'd need a way to break down the bone meal so it can chelate enough for your plants to uptake. iirc, NFTG does this through BioAG fulvics and brewing for a long time.

Maybe you can check how KNF Water Soluble Calcium Phosphate is made.

You have to slow burn to charcoal animal bones and then make them react with brown rice vinegar.

I don't know if something similar could be done with the bone meal instead of the bone pieces, since it's recommended not to ground the bones to make the bone-vinegar solution.

Since the thread was started about Nectars Harvest there is a video where they explain how they make their liquid bone meal. I don't use their products and never will but am impressed that they would provide some insight into how they produce their liquid bone meal product.

xtsho said:

but am impressed that they would provide some insight into how they produce their liquid bone meal product.

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I' ve found that here in my country, lots of companies don't list their ingredients. And when you ask, the don't like to answer, like if i was going to steal something from them...
Funny thing is that top brands and companies list the ingredients, and these guys pretend to sell me a 0-50-30 "bloom booster", which is clearly monopotassium phosphate, like if it was a secret formula of they own LOL.

JHake said:

I' ve found that here in my country, lots of companies don't list their ingredients. And when you ask, the don't like to answer, like if i was going to steal something from them...
Funny thing is that top brands and companies list the ingredients, and these guys pretend to sell me a 0-50-30 "bloom booster", which is clearly monopotassium phosphate, like if it was a secret formula of they own LOL.

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Most of them are all using the same ingredients from the same chemical factories in just slightly different formulations. Most of those bloom boosters are just monopotassium phosphate, potassium sulfate, magnesium sulfate, etc... There are companies selling bottles of premixed magnesium sulfate/epsom salts for $20 a bottle and people buy it because it has a cool label and says Big and Bloom. Take a couple cups of epsom salts, dissolve in water, put in a bottle. The packaging sometimes costs more than what's inside.

The bone meal is in a fine powder. I mixed some in water and it got real cloudy so it has to be somewhat soluble, no?

I'm getting stuff from a local farming supply shop. He also has seaweed powder. I'm pretty sure if I put it in a brew bag with a water pump circulating in there, it's got to do something.

Looking for a ratio...

I mean it is pennies on the dollar against herc harvest. Just like Gen Hydroponics VS Jacks - you are paying for water.

tommyinajar said:

The bone meal is in a fine powder. I mixed some in water and it got real cloudy so it has to be somewhat soluble, no?

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only so much would go into solution...you can put 5lbs of the powder in the bucket if you wanted to, the solution would only hold so much in suspension, that's called saturation. here NaCl is used as in this google example.
A saturated solution is a solution that contains the maximum amount of solute that is capable of being dissolved. At 20°C, the maximum amount of NaCl that will dissolve in 100. g of water is 36.0 g. If any more NaCl is added past that point, it will not dissolve because the solution is saturated.

JHake said:

Maybe you can check how KNF Water Soluble Calcium Phosphate is made.

Water-Soluble Calcium Phosphate (Ws-Capo)

Cho Global Natural Farming, SARRA India

www.cgnfindia.com

You have to slow burn to charcoal animal bones and then make them react with brown rice vinegar.

I don't know if something similar could be done with the bone meal instead of the bone pieces, since it's recommended not to ground the bones to make the bone-vinegar solution.

Click to expand...

I was actually thinking about trying that method. I'm already doing a bunch of KNF and JADM. I have a gallon of rice vinegar and bone meal I made. The bones were all boiled to make soup stock and then roasted and ground. I may roast the bones some more and I don't think that them being ground like I did will be a problem. If anything it should speed up the process some. I'll strain the liquid afterwards. I'll probably also make some liquid calcium using the same process. I save all my eggshells and bones along with everything else that can be used in the garden. I don't throw any organic scrap material away these days as it can all be used in some way as plant food.

How long does it take for a top dressing of bone meal to become available?

re: the layer you build up using Herc, check out using SLF-100 instead of Hygrozyme. Hygrozyme (some say) will harm the beneficials/living soil where SLF itself is an inoculant. It's what the Nectar folks recommend along with Photosynthesis + as complimenting their line.

xtsho said:

I may roast the bones some more and I don't think that them being ground like I did will be a problem. If anything it should speed up the process some. .

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Made me remember that once i tried the calcium input with limestone instead of eggshells. Already did it with eggshells and believe it turned out good; it reads 8000ppm.

At the end i ended up tossing the limestone experiment, but because of laziness.
What i remember having the impression that more vinegar was needed since the grounded limestone has more surface area than the eggshells, so 1:10 KNF ratio needed a little tweak.
Will try it again.

youraveragehorticulturist said:

How long does it take for a top dressing of bone meal to become available?

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That would depend on the quantity of biological life in your soil imo

I'm not goiing through all that to make bone meal from scratch. I can't see why anyone would do that with the price of powdered meal unless they wanted to try it. Same as eggshell cal-mag.

PS anyone got a GOOD calmag mix using calcium powder?

Well after watching the video and reading a lot, I think you have to mill the powdered bone meal into a Flour type substance, then boil it and strain it and you've got it, but as far as the strength or dose, IDK.

Just gonna chime in here. You can make it.

Buy a 50lb sack of bone meal for $40... More if you're going to a grow store, rather than an ag supply. I prefer fish bone meal specifically because it digests more quickly.

Optional - char your bone. Basically if you don't, it won't be as soluable. A giant soup pot from the thrift store plus a camp fire will be an easy way. Unless you're out west, you'll have to wait for next winter lol. Don't even think about using your stove top if you've got the fish bone.

Next, find a 5 gallon bucket with a lid that closes firmly. Fill 1/4 if using finely ground beef bone, halfway if flakey fish bone meal, and pour in cheap rice vinegar until the bone meal is covered, multiple gallons. Any acid works. Humic acid works but it's more expensive. Water ph'd to below 4 works but I try to use whole inputs. Allow to sit for about a week in full sun with lid on.

Return after a week to diversify the fermentation. Get a cup of molasses. Go grab some imo from the woods, and gather quick composting fresh greens such as nettle, purslane, comfrey, chickweed, lambs quarter etc. Add molasses and if you used finely ground bone, enough water to loosen it up to stir. Add the imo and stir. Add the greens and keep adding until you are packing the bucket like a pickle jar. Add water to the top. Lid on, and leave it in the full sun for several months.

When the bucket has sat for multiple months, check to see if it smells like the worst thing ever. It will. It should. Congrats.

It should go to a full sludge. There won't be anything to strain out, it will be one homogeneous poopy texture.

2 to 4 cups per 100 gals and add Epsom for magnesium.

This can be tank mixed directly if you've got a pump that'll deal with solids, or leached from a tea bag. Either way, the tank should be aerated over night, or fixed up with peroxide, to kill off the anerobes that have done your digestion. We don't really need them in the dirt.

If you are indoors you run the risk of stinky house forever. I learned how to do this stuff from an old guy veggie farmer who uses metal trash cans and gets a row of ten or so different mixes going, smells like vomit and death from 30 yards.