Rapeseed meal as fertilizer for Scot Pine

[Nishant]

Hello Friends, Is rapeseed meal as fertilizer good for Scot Pine? Please share your experience on this.

 

[Shibui]

Rapeseed or any other seed meal supplies some nutrients as it breaks down but it may not supply all the major nutrients in required amounts or trace elements. Also takes some time to break down enough to release the nutrients.
Usually used as one component of home made fertilizer. Other additives used to supply the elements rapeseed may not have.

Modern commercial fertilizers are much more likely to have everything your plants need in the balance required by plants and are generally much easier to use.

 

[meushi]

Hello Friends, Is rapeseed meal as fertilizer good for Scot Pine? Please share your experience on this.

Rapeseed meal is ok, but there are two types:
-fat meal (press extraction only, about 8% oil remaining)
-fully extracted meal (press extraction, followed by solvent extraction of the leftovers, about 1% oil remaining)

Most of the commercially available rapeseed meal is the fully extracted kind. Knowing a farmer making his own rapeseed feed or pressing your own rapeseed are pretty much the only ways to get fat meal. Maruta Tamahi from Joy Agris is pre-fermented fat meal.

You mix the meal with water until you get a pancake batter-like consistency, you cover and let it ferment a few weeks (up to 3 months depending on temperatures). Shape it into a sausage of the thickness you want and chop it into 1" sections or use a carp boilies maker to speed up the process. You let the resulting pellets/balls fully dry before using them. Obviously, you can totally save time/effort and buy Maruta Tamahi... the large tin box (8kg) is more cost effective than the smaller packs... the large box is only marginally more expensive than two 1.5kg bags.

If you go down the route of solid organic ferts, you will need to clean/replace the top layer of soil at least once a year as the leftovers tend to form a crust.

I tend to give my trees tamahi as a baseline, then top it up with other ferts on a loose schedule (very diluted hydrolyzed fish/kelp, humic acid, liquid organic, liquid mineral).

 

[Bnana]

You can use it if you like to make things overly complicated for yourself.