For you vegans that use cow/chicken/animal manure in your vegetable gardens, where do you get the manure? I ask because I would imagine most commercial manure comes from factory farm waste. How do you vegans feel about this? Anybody have any information as to the source of commercial manure?
I do not grow my own vegetables, but this is something I have thought about. I do not know what they grow the vegetables that I eat in. We live in a small house and there's really no way I could grow my own vegetables to eat. So I am sure I eat some that have been grown in animal manure. I feel when the demand for animal flesh goes down, alternate fertilizer will be sought after and in this aspect I really don't have much of a choice.
At my current house we don't have a garden, but we grow herbs and tomatoes in pots. We use worm castings and organic fertilizers made for potted plants. If you have a garden, I highly recommend getting a worm composter. We have one in our kitchen (no, it doesn't smell) and we feed the worms our veggie scraps, greens that have gone bad, banana peels, etc. They're pretty well-fed worms! Then we use the liquid they produce ("worm tea") as a plant fertilizer, and after several months they produce enough worm castings (their poo) to harvest. The worm bin makes harvesting easy by using multiple layers, and the worms migrate to a different layer when you're ready to harvest and use the castings. Now we have an extra few hundred "pets" that are quite low-maintenance as well.
That's very interesting, Barter Mama! I've heard of such things in passing, but never in such detail before. I'm starting my first ever full-fledged veg garden this year. I've just been adding my kitchen scraps to a regular old compost pile, but it's frustrating because it takes so long. Where do you get the worm composter?
I just have a small garden and am still working on my system, but I don't use animal manure. This year I plan on using mostly kelp meal and compost along with a little corn meal worked into the soil. If I wanted to use animal manure I have several sources I can get it from where I know how the animals are treated. I have been thinking about a worm composter. Did you build your own, barter mama?
I just use my own vegetable compost. The soil where my garden sits is already worm-rich, so I just mix in some mature compost with the existing soil, and the garden comes up fine.
