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What Is Blood Meal Fertilizer? How To Apply Blood Meal To Plants & What Else You Should Add 🌿
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Apr 25, 2022
Blood meal is a great addition for anyone looking for a nitrogen boost. Blood meal while organic has a shockingly high level of nitrogen. This nitrogen boost is perfect for anyone growing vegetative houseplants or leafy greens. But for those gardeners focused on fruit development the nitrogen value of blood meal maybe too high. Is Blood Meal A Complete Fertilizer? Why Blood Meal Should Be Used With Houseplants & Not Gardens 🌿 This Is an example of a quality blood meal: https://geni.us/ZDuUmS A Non-Amazon option Is this: https://bit.ly/3Ep2T6a Join our monthly newsletter! newsletter.gardeningincanada.net Website/Blog & FREE printables: https://gardeningincanada.net Leave Me A Voice Message To Be Included In The Podcast: https://memo.fm/gardeningincanada/ —————— 👩🔬 Grab A Planner! Paperback Houseplant Planner: https://geni.us/NFTrl2 Paperback Garden Planner:
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0:00
hello fun people how are you guys doing today if you're new around here my name is Ashley and I'm
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a soil scientist on this channel I like to take that science and apply it to all things plants
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and in today's video we're talking about blood meal so I'm doing the video on bone meal and the
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blood meal in the same day because they kind of go hand in hand they're generally applied together
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or as a mix and that is because when you combine blood meal and bone meal together you get a
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complete nutrient profile of the NPKs and then some obviously micronutrients involved that just calcium iron that sort of thing that is why we're doing
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them together but let's talk about what makes blood mill valuable or not
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valuable in your garden for your house plants whatever the case is and situations in which you should or should not apply blood mill to your plants so
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blood meal is and bone meal it's not vegan vegetarian friendly whatsoever is
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literally dried blood from the slaughterhouses when there's meat slaughtered so kind of cool that we're using all parts of the animal sort of
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disgusting what do you think about it in and of itself but these really high
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nitrogen with some phosphorus and then obviously there's iron in there as well
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so first off let's look at what the studies say about the iron in the blood
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mill there isn't a ton of research done on this product in particular and I find
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that when it comes to blood mills bone meals grass anything that is just
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generic and there's not money behind it like if it's not miracle grow mix or if
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it's not pro mix mix or if it's not proprietary blends of microbes there's
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not a lot of funding for it and so therefore the lack of subsidies or the
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lack of money behind it because there's no company behind it results in really
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poor literature about it I guess that's the reason why you know Doritos does so
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much better than like cucumbers obviously there's no cucumber salesmen out there talking about the benefits of eating endless amounts of cucumbers or Doritos because there no money there So with that being said there is some research out there that helps us understand
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the benefits of the product or the maybe issues with the product, but not a ton. And one of those
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things that was studied was specifically the iron in the blood meal itself. So the iron comes from
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from the hemoglobin which contains iron so the availability of the iron is increased the longer
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the blood meal spends in the soil profile and so the thought process behind this is it's just
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progressive degradation of the hemoglobin inside of this kind of dried powder that is applied and
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so it's what we call successive chelation something really similar that happens when
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it comes to like rock dusts but in a little bit more of an expedited fashion when it comes
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to the blood meal in and of itself so I did an entire video on the benefits of iron and
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the 17 essential nutrients playlist so go check that out if you want to learn more about
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specifically what iron does for plants but it is beneficial to have both for house plants and then
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obviously for fruits and veggies or flowers as well and perennials and that sort of thing so
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with that being said the typical way to apply or the best way to apply a blood meal would be
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directly root place um or just above the rhizosphere allowing gravity to bring it down
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into the the natural vicinity of the plant because uh blood meal does have nitrogen in it and
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nitrogen is water soluble it does leach but it also volubilizes so it gases off as well as moves
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with water through the system and so due to that factor we want to make sure that we have it risospere
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placed under a certain layer of soil um and then for the iron if that root placed it always in our better interest now i was reading not studies but just commentary like gardening how blog posts and they were saying that excessive application of
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dried blood meal can cause burning and i don't like when it comes to organic substances there
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should be no burning unless there's really high salt content so I'm not sure if dried blood has
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really high salt or not there's nothing I can find in the literature pointing to salinity but it was
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a really common theme I was seeing throughout all these blog posts saying if you apply too much
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you're gonna burn your plants and so I've never personally used blood meal I'm a super basic
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person when it comes to plant nutrients and for both gardening and house plants and that's just
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because I already know what's in the soil and I already know what the plants are capable of doing
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on their own without these really fancy expensive products added in so if anyone has had experience
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with burning please let me know in the comments down below because that would reference some sort
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of salinity which I mean it would make sense to me kind of because we're human and we need salts
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to function and so with that being said it would make sense that it'd be some salinity there
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but I just don't know how much so that is something that maybe you want to keep in mind
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if you're choosing to use a blood meal in your house plant or your your garden situation now the
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one thing that I did find a little concerning is it does throw your carbon
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to nitrogen balance off so it is really high nitrogen really low in carbon and
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so this is maybe where the bone blood meal mixed together would be the better
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case but that carbon to nitrogen ratio being thrown off and really increasing
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the nitrogen obviously can affect your microbial communities for example and and just natural soil functions so that is something to keep in mind if you're
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going to add blood meal you going to want to use a healthy dose of organic material with it as well whether that be leaf mold compost manure sport of the cases it not a complete fertilizer and I
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also was reading it can cause unwanted visitors so blood now obviously smells
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like blood and particular it smells like animal blood so that can mean
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raccoons rats dogs cats all may be attracted to the area that this is put and that's just another
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reason why you're going to want to dig it in and place it rises to your place rather than having it
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just really nearly floating around on top of the soil surface because it's less than ideal to have
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critters in our gardens yeah that's all i have for you guys today on the blood meal
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I would like iron isn't something that's typically deficient in the soil it is
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really high nitrogen so and it's really low phosphorus and potassium so you may
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notice lots of foliage growth and not a lot of fruit flower development meaning
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if you're going for like a vegetative plant or if you're going for house
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plants then using a blood meal is going to be valuable because it's going to be
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very high in foliage content but if you are doing like tomatoes peppers things that aren't
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necessarily greenery that's something that you may want to consider and you may want to pull back on
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using blood meal if you're a container gardener house plant gardener again that's going to be
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something where you're going to want to consider blood meal because obviously iron isn't going to
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be as prolific in a soilless medium so just something to keep in mind there as well that's
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all I have for you guys today on blood meal if you enjoyed the video be sure to give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button then let me know in the comments
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down below if you use blood meal and please do let me know if you've noticed
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the burning before as well I'll talk to you guys next time bye
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Thank you
#Biological Sciences