Re: milk as fertilizer

Dave,

Yes. I give any leftover or soured milk and other spoiled dairy products to my outdoor plants especially tomatoes and green peppers in order to prevent blossom end rot. One cup of liquid milk contains about 300 mg of calcium. Dry milk contains 1.14% potassium, 0.80% calcium, and 0.43% phosphorous. Milk also contains protein. Proteins are made up of amino acids in which an NH2 group is attached to the carbon atom adjacent to a carboxyl group (COOH). The N in NH2 is nitrogen which along with the phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals in milk would act like other fertilizers. It would be too expensive and a terrible waste of food to do this on a large scale, but rinsing out milk jugs or using spoiled milk for this purpose is an environmentally sound practice. In fact when I was reading in this forum about using calcium to prevent rot in irises, it occurred to me that insufficient calcium could be the reason that my irises and hen-and-chicks are susceptible to the rot that I was describing.

I live on an infertile clay mound strewn with erratic rocks that was once covered by the lip of the last glacier to cover Minnesota about ten thousand years ago. The base of the glacier, which approached this area from the west, stopped about a mile west of where I live leaving limestone cliffs exposed with the Straight River flowing along the base of these cliffs. The lip of the glacier extended for about a mile eastward. Farther east from my place the land is flat and fertile. Not here. As I said, I am on a clay hill pushed up by the glacier with many beautiful, steep ravines that were formed when the snow/ice of the lip melted and ran off leaving the rocks from as far away as Canada behind. We also have the endangered dwarf trout lily growing on our land next to the creek. It grows in two counties in Minnesota and nowhere else in the world.

Lee Hill Zone 4 Minnesota

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