I actually got a huge big sack of this stuff as a Christmas present 2 years ago.I have never used it and have to do something with it,The bag is split and is is now in a dustbin.
I know nothing about it and would like to get it out of my shed .
Could I sprinkle the lot over our two full sized lotties in one go,or use it in handfuls around plants this year. ??? If so how much. the directions have faded.
Eg. if I was to put it round say my squash or cabbages how much per plant and how often please.
Is it awful stuff or good stuff??
Thank you Jeannine
Growmore is the bog-standard balanced NPK water soluble inorganic fertiliser. Application rate of about 4oz per sq yard, maybe 6oz for hungry stuff like squash or sweetcorn. It says it can be applied every 4-6 weeks, but that seems a awful lot. I apply it once for each crop
Jeannine-growmore was introduced after WW2 I think as a balanced fertiliser-it`s not considered `organic` but nobody is perfect. And a good handful wherever would do no harm . I don`t use it because for reasons that may be myth I think blood ,fish and bone might be slower to release.
But it`s something I wrestle with-is Fish blood and bone a byproduct of over fishing and factory farming? I`m thinking about going back to growmore and also using chicken pellets from a reliable source
National Growmore was developed for the Dig for Victory campaigns in the war.. fairly certain it is a balance of all three main groups N P K and is widely used. We put a handfull in each of our large pots and baskets once a month through the summer..
::)
So, I won't chuck it, and I have to do something with it so it may as well be on my land as in a land fill.
If I put a handful round each plant as I put them in would that be OK?
Can I put it round everything, cabbages etc, squash, corn ,beans, apragus and strawberry bed and my sodt fruit trees, what ever. I know nothing about it.
Is there anything I should keep it away from.
Thank you again XX Jeannine
Jeannine do you have a flower garden in addition to an allotment?. If you have concerns about using it on veg flowers are very fond of it applied as Rhubarb Thrasher says, once a season. Now is fine.
yes Growmore is fast release compared to BF and B, maybe that's why they say apply every 4-6 weeks, what your plants don't utilise gets washed out . Because it's balanced, you'ld still need to apply your normal high potassium feeds for toms + other fruiting crops (if you do that)
Hi Jeannine, |Growmore is the by product of the armament industry. The N.P.K. is 7-7-7, a general artificial fertilizer. A handful around each plant? Depends on the size of your hands. When I use G/M I only use one application per plant per season, at 4oz per sq yard. Yes, you can use it around everything, veg, fruit and flowers.
What do you mean about the armament industry, do you mean bombs etc. I can't be involved with anything to do with war or guns or bombs etc can you please tell me a lot more about this,I need to be sure. Thank you Jeannine
It has nothing to do with armaments.
In the second world war (as previously in the first) the number of allotments soared to 1.5m+, as people were encouraged by the government to tackle the general shortage of food by growing their own.
However, this resulted in shortages of manure and fertilisers. A company called George Monro & Son, a horticultural products company, came up with an artificial balanced fertiliser in 1942 called National Growmore to beat the shortages .. subsequently shortened to Growmore (in the 1980s? - I forget). As previously mentioned it is 7:7:7.
Click on the link below for info about the company
http://www.monrosouth.co.uk/html/company.html (http://www.monrosouth.co.uk/html/company.html)
For anybody who is interested in history, the following link shows leaflets that were issued during the war as part of the Dig for Victory campaign.
http://www.earthlypursuits.com/AllotGuide/DigforVictory1/DigForVictory1_1.htm (http://www.earthlypursuits.com/AllotGuide/DigforVictory1/DigForVictory1_1.htm)
Nitrogen, as ammonia or nitrate compounds, is essential for plant growth, but they're not too common in nature. For instance Spain declared war on Chile in 1865 over their guano deposits (bird poo, a rich source of nitrogen compounds). Also, I believe twas Sir William Crookes, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, who said in 1898, something like - the greatest challenge facing the ingenuity of science in the coming century will be the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Well the problem was solved by Haber and Bosch during the First World War, but not soon enough for the Germans to win. Nitrogen is very stable, nitrates are not, so they're good explosives too. Poor Herr Haber was also the Father of Chemical Weapons. After one day supervising gasing British soldiers on the front line, at a dinner party, his wife was so appalled by what he was doing, that she shot herself dead with his service revolver. Apparently the next day, he was at it again, gasing Russians. Poor Herr Haber also spent lots of time after the war trying to extract gold from sea water to pay for the reparations, but his equilibrium calculations were wrong and it was never going to work. Tho a good German, unfortunately Herr Haber was a Jew, so when the Nazis came to power, he had to escape to Switzerland, but died on the way, presumably of a broken heart.
As with the First war, so with the Second. At the end of the War, America's production of ammonium for explosives was vast. What to do with it all? Switch to production of crops with high nitrogen requirements, like sweetcorn, and use corn syrup as an animal feed. I think about 90% of all animal feed in the US is High Fructose Corn Syrup. This means (tho I couldn't check) that in the 18 month life of your average steer, the poor thing has had 17 gallons of corn syrup, which it can't cope with. It would die of acidosis if it wasn't killed first. Of course now in the US, nearly all of this is GM too
So much for Growmore.
On a lighter note, talking about German Chemists, did you know that Olivia Newton John's grandfather won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics?
RT what an amazingly interesting post. I'd often wondered why fertilizers seemed to be dangerous in the 'wrong hands'. Now i know thanks. Also horrid about the corn syrup for animals in the US - I have read a lot about the food industry in the States & it all sounds appalling & not much better here - which is why we all Grow Our Own. :)
RhubarbThrasher, have you read 'Mauve.How one man invented a colour and changed the world.'
by simon Garfield.?
there was at least one factual error in my post. If Fritz Haber was gassing Russian soldiers on the day after his wife shot herself, it's probably safe to assume he was gassing Russian soldiers on the day before, not British. He'd be a pretty scarey individual if he was testing chlorine on the enemy, one Nation at a time
We were at it too. The poison gas Lewisite, which smells of geraniums, was discovered by an American priest at the Catholic University of America in 1918. The Americans used it in the Second World War, and the Iraqis in the Iraq Iran war
The first generation of nerve-gases, organo-phosphorus compounds, were originally developed as pesticides, but those pesky German chemists realised they were on to something when a whole laboratory of people fell down twitching (apparently)
Good old Perkin. Tried to make quinine, and ended up with his mauve. No I haven't read the book, tho i've probably made the mauve (by accident) :D. I think at the 150 anniversary of the discovery of it, the Royal Society of chemistry had Perkin's original stuff analysed, and found that not only wasn't it quinine, it also wasn't Perkin's Mauve either
Oh eck, and | just wanted to know if I could feed it to my rhubarb etc
Quote from: Jeannine on May 23, 2007, 11:27:33
Oh eck, and | just wanted to know if I could feed it to my rhubarb etc
Ain't the internet wonderful, eh? ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
My suggestion, FWIW, is to ignore all this nonsense about ordnance production, amusing though it is. A moment's thought will reassure you that:
(a) Nitrate based explosives haven't been used in warfighting ordnance for donkey's years.
(b) Although sad suicide bombers blow people up with fertiliser-based home made explosives, it's the explosives that are made out of fertiliser. Not fertiliser made out of explosives. They also use diesel oil and sugar in the mix. You wouldn't sell your diesel car and stop making jam because they're "by products of the armaments industry" ::)
(c) World production of fertiliser is many orders of magnitude more than world production of explosives. It is unthinkable that nitrates are a "by product" of explosives production.
thinking about all that guff, not only was most of it pre-internet, it was actually pre-computer. Which was why I got Carl Bosch's name wrong.
If you think that it's unthinkable that nitrate production is a byproduct of explosive production, well try teling that to the British and American scientists that were crawling all over the German's pilot plant in 1918
Nitrates were originally produced on a large scale (for the time) to make gunpowder; agricultural use developed out of the guano deposits found off the west coast of South America, when they eventually discovered that nitrate did the same thing, and was cheaper. But I wouldn't worry about that; it's historical info, not a current link.
Any link between British Growmore and US Growmore (http://growmore.com/) which is the one Google always throws up?
Quote from: Rhubarb Thrasher on May 23, 2007, 14:02:31
thinking about all that guff, not only was most of it pre-internet, it was actually pre-computer. Which was why I got Carl Bosch's name wrong.
If you think that it's unthinkable that nitrate production is a byproduct of explosive production, well try teling that to the British and American scientists that were crawling all over the German's pilot plant in 1918
At the risk of boring on about this, I understand the history, but we're now nearly a hundred years on! Even I, with my schoolboy knowledge, could make you a very satisfying bang with a dustbin full of stuff bought in Wyevale and Tesco, but I don't kid myself that that's how modern explosives are made.
I tried to find figures on world production of ammonia and nitrates, but it's nearly impossible. And I'm well out of touch with modern chemical engineering, so the old uses in metallurgy and plastics manufacturing may well have been superseded.
<Internet fantsay mode ON> Nitrates are used in pork pies, too. Ergo, explosives are a by-product of the pie industry. :( If we could only ban pies, there'd be no more war. If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring .... </Internet fantasy>
to jeannine wow you started something there didn,t ya girl. learning from a4all continues to make me seem more intelligent than i am
marg
Jeanine,I think it boils down to, if you try to garden organically don't use it,if you don't do! :)
Try buying saltpetre?-not a gardening issue but it`s getting hard to find for curing a leg of pork
No that's easy Cleo cos I buy it all the time
You can also dissolve some growmore to make a liquid feed.
Quote from: legendaryone on May 25, 2007, 07:45:00
You can also dissolve some growmore to make a liquid feed.
Bit early yet, I read that as 'You can dissolve Growmore to make saltpetre'! :o
Jeannine - the only trouble with Growmore, is that if it gets wet, it turns to difficult to use gunk
the explosive stuff was just for interest, no need for a fuss
In the Battle of Somewhere, and the Battle of the Falkland Islands (the one with the Scharnhorst) Britain completely cut of the German's supply of Chile saltpeter, vital for explosives, essentially the world's only source. The consensus is that the War would have ended in 1916 without an alternative supply for Germany, so Mr Haber bears some responsibility for prolonging the war 2 years. The alternative process to Haber's for producing synthetic ammonia was the cyanamide process, tho the ammonia produced in this way was difficult to convert to nitric acid since the impurities in the gas poisoned the catalyst. Between 1915-Nov 1918 Haber-Bosch via BASF produced 414 million Marks worth of nitrogen compounds, of which only 24.5 M. Marks worth was for fertilisers. Presumably similar figures apply for cyanamide ammonia. The disastrous wheat harvests in Germany 1917-1918 are attributed to virtually all ammonia production being used for explosives.
I'd say that the foundation of the synthetic ammonia/nitrate industry was completely based on explosive manufacture
It's true to say that nitrates and ammonia aren't used in conventional explosives now, but all modern high explosives are made using nitric acid, via ammonia, so it's the same thing
I've forgotten how this started
All I need to know is . Am I using/buying a by product of bombs!!! I am a pacifist don't forget so I got a bit worried as war/guns/bombs/fighting etc is a no no for me . I mean no offence, it is just me personally.I thoroughly respect others right to choose.
The history is very interesting, it is quite amazing actually, well the bits I understand as some of it is very technical.
XX Jeannine
There's a very close historical link, but I doubt whether the companies making fertiliser now have any direct link with the arms industry.
Forget all the history, just chuck some on your rhubarb and see if it grows with a bang.
I do use salt petre in some curing recipes !!! Oh eck.Here we go again.
Really very interesting to read ,it is truly amazing what folks know ,and we all differ too.
XX Jeannine
I just showed this post to John who said he sprinkled some around the veggies and fruit on Wednesday,apparently nothing exploded,but to be sure I have advised him not to wee wee in those areas.
I think we are going to dump the rest on the flat plot, and turn it in.
XX Jeannine
course saltpetre traditionally used to be extracted from middens. I know it used to be required in China for all villages to have communal dumping grounds for human wee, for fertilisers
Jeannine,
Get a life. Use salt petre for curing.
Use Growmore around your veg.
There's no issue!
tho Growmore don't quite say what's in it, there isn't any saltpetre
Now for my bit of history;
It was actually produced & made by what was then ICI for; and as has already been mentioned it was produced as an uncomplicated fertiliser for the British public to use during the Dig for Victory campaign.
n.b. so much for the 'uncomplicated bit' ;D when you consider sixty + years on and it is still a mystery ;D
As you will see in the Link above companies such as Monro's introduced it (sold it if you like) as did many other companies throughout the country.
The fertiliser/explosive scenario was used a great deal in the 'quarrying' industry because it was much cheaper than gelignite.
In the earlies sixties the company I worked for had a license to produce it and without going into too much detail it was made from ammonium nitrate and diesel.
It was quite safe you could hit it with a hammer and it would not go off but a little gelignite and a detonator and you got a 'bl**dy big bang from it!!
Back to the Growmore; I think it is a very good fertiliser still! I buy a 25kg bag every year to use on my flower beds and as a top dressing on my veg when I need to supplement my initial top dressing of fish blood & bone.
I know the stuff; the IRA used to use it. It's horribly easy to make (so are a lot of explosives, unfortunately) but you need a lot of it to do much damage.
Tee Gee, so on you veg how much and how often in handful round a plant for eg is a handful too much or OK and how often would you do it, and do you do it to all your veggies please Thank you
J,
I was given some as well but not sure how old it is how long does it last?
c7
growmore will last for years if it's kept dry, otherwise you'll start losing the nitrogen.
i don't like putting it round individual plants, just in case you put too much and damage the plant. i just broadcast it over large areas as per instructions
QuoteTee Gee, so on you veg how much and how often
Now adays I don't measure it out as such I just use my eye!
However I can recall the first time I used it I set out 4 canes to form a square yard then I measured out 4 ounces of growmore then I spread it within the area formed by the canes.
In this way I saw the density of the grains laid and kept that picture in my minds eye ever since.
Another tip I used till I got used to the density was to put 4oz in a container and mark the container then because my beds were a yard and a half wide I spread this amount over a 2 ft strip. and voila 4oz/sq yd.
Regarding how often I put it on it was simply a case of once a season (ie before planting out) on my flower beds.
With veg I prefer to use Fish blood & bone because the blood is a fast nitrogen release for the young plants. Occasionally (if I remember) I sometimes spread some(growmore) around when I am planting successional crops.
Personally I like to grow my plants other than fruit mean & lean, I think things grow and taste better for this.
Too much watering and feeding tends to make everything seem watery and tasteless.
Thats an opinion maybe its me thats mean & lean ;)
Actually Tee Gee I rarely use any fertiliser stuff at all. I was beginning to think I was obselete. XX Jeannine
thanks Jeannine, I leant lots of new things prompted from this thread. I never knew that the German Navy shelled Hartlepool and Scarborough in 1914 for example, and I actually took the trouble to see what 4 oz of Growmore actually looks like, for the first time in 25 years
Good grief, the sun's just come out after two days of solid rain.
Will have to go to the plots to spread some growmore to replace what has been washed out!
I use BFB at planting time, the Bone element loses its' effectiveness @50%/year. So it's useful for 3 years - or so I've always been lead to believe.
Quotethe German Navy shelled Hartlepool and Scarborough in 1914
The story has it; the locals of Hartlepool hung a monkey in case they (the Germans) had sent it in as a spy along with the shells!!
Geordies still get very worked up about that!
Tee Gee all the time I have been on this Forum I feel you have been one of the most knowledgable persons on it, but I am afraid I will have to correct you on the monkey hanging story. In fact it was during the Napoleonic wars that a monkey was washed up on the beach on the headlands in old Hartlepool from a shipwreck, they thought it was a French spy because they had never seen a Frenchman before so they hung the monkey thinking it was a French spy. ;D ;D ;D
I stand corrected...........another ageing moment I guess........thanks for keeping me right!!
The OH comes from Hartlepool and the outlaws are staying so its a story that stays in my head Tee Gee. ;D ;D ;D
My mother was born there and I knew about the hanging of the monkey from her. Must have not been listening about the Frenchies!
Stand in the corner Tee Gee and repeat one hundred times I must listen to mother. ;D ;D ;D
Oh Telboy I've been told to tell you there not Geordies. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
I'm a bit surprised I didn't realise about the bombing, cus the last time I was in Hartlepool, in about 1980, it looked as though they still hadn't got round to repairing rhe damage
Lots of places hung monkeys Looe in Cornwall for instance. The Napoleonic War was a bad time to be a monkey in the French Navy
Monkey-hangers are GEORDIES? :o
Falls into the Tyne in shock :D
Whey ye bugger man!
One does apologise for one's last post.
One had a burst of region-related patriotic fever. ;D
How did we get from fertilising rhubarb to hanging monkeys!!!
Search me Jeannine but at least we've learnt a bit of history. ;D ;D ;D
Oh I forgot can you put it on the rhubarb. ;D ;D ;D
Jeaninne...what have you started ? !!!! ::) Rohaise
It's good in't it.
Now who can tell me the story about the old woman who was supposed to turn stuff into stone somewhere in Yorkshire...old healer I think,went there as a kid and they hung my teddy up on a rope !!!???
XX Jeannine
I believe you mean Mother Shipton with her Cave and her Well and her Prophecies and her Gift Shop and Her Souvenir Tea Towels and her Fridge Magnets and her............
Oh ,Heavens to Betsy, that is her, I wonder if she grew rhubarb,or kept monkeys.
I don't remember much about it,only losing my bear, I suppose it is very commercial now is it? XX Jeannine
That's not the gorgon Medusa by any chance?
I think in her spare time she made Tabun and Sarin Nerve Gas on her Aga
RT You are so wicked!!
well she was a witch after all. She had her reputation to keep up. hubble bubble, toil and trouble, as the Great Bard Manfred Mann said
Now you just behave yourself, most witches were not naughty you know,that is just the media image.
I thought Mother Shipton was a healer or prophet,and seriously I would like to know.
I wonder if my bear is still there!!!
Oh and they didn't have the Aga back then,at lest not hooked up in the backwoods.
You make me laugh a lot.
XX Jeannine
"wise woman" then Jeannine, if you want to be
Prophetically Correct
here's something about her
http://www.crystalinks.com/mother_shipton.html (http://www.crystalinks.com/mother_shipton.html)
http://www.nostradamus-repository.org/shipton.html (http://www.nostradamus-repository.org/shipton.html)
I think most of her verses were written after her death, I mean by someone else of course. They're mostly all doom and gloom. Typical Cheery Yorkshire Person
Oh, I shall get you back for that one.
I do have a personal witchy friend you know, too bad she is a real sweetie,so I won't be able to coax her to turn you into a frog!!!
XXX From another Typically Cheery Yorkshire Person. XXXX Jeannine
Joking aside Jeannine I found working in Yorkshire, actually living in Chesterfield and working in Sheffield, to be one of the nicest times i've had. I thought Yorkshire folk were great, together with the beer and the pies
Bless your heartXX Jeannine
So, to sum up, then:
Growmore, the well-hung monkey, was blown up by the Bosch... Salt Peter, who smelt of geraniums, ate his corn syrup on GMTV... and Mother Shipton shot herself...
Yes?
Precisely. I'm glad someone was paying attention
But what happened to the ruddy bear?