what makes bat guano so awesome as fertilizer?

[vash]

i used readily available fertilizer with chicken poop.

my buddy is using a mix of kelp, bat poop and some other thing i cant remember in his alchemy of home brew fertilizer. keep in mind we are both growing vastly different things. my stuff goes into a salad.

i see the jugs of kelp fertilizer. not cheap. i dont see bat poop very often, but it got me thinking.

bats eat bugs right? i remmember being 8 years old and going down into Carlsbad Caverns. i remember a park ranger telling us back in the day they shipped all the bat guano to california for the citrus industry. i dont know why i remember that, but it stuck.

[Tobra]

They eat a lot of protein. A lot of nitrogen in protein. Same with bird poop, high in soluble nitrogen.

[Laneco]

Lots of nitrogen in it, lots of micronutrients, and may help with resistance to fungus type growth.

It's still utterly disgusting.

angela

[RWebb]

not just N, PO4 & K

just ask James Bond

[look 171]

You just gotta to kill two birds with one stone. Go out and water it before you go off to bed and do it again in the morning. Save on two toilet flushings.

[Jeff Hail]

Its not called White Gold for nothing.

[Jeff Higgins]

If this current pandemic is any indication, it must be the myriad of antibodies in it.

[Rusty Heap]

our llama poop makes awesome black gold soil.

Llamalizer

[tevake]

Back in the days of sailing ships, some were sent on long voyages, sometimes around the world to get to remote islands where seabirds roosted and had literally covered the islands with guano. The ships would anchor and the crew would go ashore and load up the longboats then load it into the ships holds. Once full, off they would go sailng back home, fragrantly.

Must have been really good fertilizer to go to those lengths to get it.

Cheers Richard

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by tevake

...Must have been really good fertilizer to go to those lengths to get it...

I guess it was the prime source of KNO3 before the Haber process for fixing nitrogen.

I love that there's an explosive called nitroguanidine, even if it turns out it didn't come from bat poop. That would have made it even better!