Ohhh my! I laughed soo hard I almost ...... well, never mind that, but I laughed REALLY hard. I kept getting this mental image of the guy leaning over the bucket while trying to pry the lid off - maybe sloshing a little of the valued elixir on his hands or shoes ..... 1 - 5 gallon bucket ............................................... $3.00 2 gallons of red & beeliner snapper parts .............. 2.00 1 - serving of blackstrap and dried molasses ......... 1.50 The look of surprise when he popped the lid ..... PRICELESS! ;o) Al

I have been using Eleanor's for quite some time now, and I really do think it works wonders. I have no scientific evidence, but my plants have just improved so much since using it. And I've never seen so much growth. I use it both for soil fertilizing (with every watering, all year round), and also as a foliar feed. Rhizo, Thanks for finding that information! Believe it or not, I HAVE the bottle and still didn't know what was in it! Only a few ingredients are listed on the bottle (I don't have it in front of me since I'm at work, but I think just NPK are written on the label...not too sure though. I think she tries to keep it a secret :) I'll bet anything that the ingredient list you found is incomplete! There must be some "special" ingredient that she's hiding from us :-) Gabi

I use a fish hydrolysate product (Neptune's, but I've seen other brands). I love it as a houseplant & general fertilizer. This alone has none of the awful smell of regular emulsion and is supposedly better in micro/macro nutrients. I love seaweed as another source of great nutrients, but it has a little smell if I use it in the houseplants (although my wife's KEEN, Lassie-like smell does not complain about it, so it can't be that bad).

One tablespoon of fish emulsion in a gallon of 6.8 ph water will actually make it quite acidic, definitely below 6, probably closer to 5. If you use 2 tablespoons per gallon, then the pH will be below 5 - I know because I test my pH. I found that using nutrients regularly without pH-upping the water resulted in terrible pH swings for me, based on my own pH testing. If you fertilize once per month, not much of an issue, but if you are fertilizing more regularly with liquid nutrients then you might want to consider it. Regarding the acidity of peat moss and it still being a great amendment - this is misleading. If you look on the back of ingredients of peat-moss based soils, such as Fox Farm, you will see dolomite lime as one of the ingredients. Peat-based potting soils typically have dolomite lime added to balance the pH, and they typically let the lime break down a bit too. If you do research on amending with peat moss, you will see that you should add some lime to balance the pH. One of the benefits of using coco coir instead of peat moss is that the pH of coco coir is 6.0, so you don't really need to balance the pH when amending if you use coco. I use peat based soils to start with but use coco for the amending for this reason. Simply having alot of organic material in your soil will not make pH swings a non-issue. My plants were displaying nitrogen deficiencies, so I kept feeding them more nitrogen, not realizing the nitrogen was lowering the pH so much that then they couldn't even absorb much nitrogen, resulting in the nitrogen deficiency. I began making sure the pH of my nutrient solution was on point and then the problem began correcting itself.