A Huntsville company thinks it has the answer to Increasing the flower production and fruit capacity of your fruits and fruiting type plants with beneficial stimulants and elements.
Croxall Foods Inc calls it Aquanure.
Co-Owner Todd Croxall was featuring the fertilizer as the way to grow plants through a technology named “plant pillars.”
"Aquanure is a fish effluent that we are selling worldwide now," Croxall told BayToday at the recent Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto.
The company had a booth at the Northern Ontario Agri-food Pavilion sponsored by FedNor.
"It's a plant fertilizer made from different types of Mother Nature's products using natural nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. We put it in a concentrated bottle using natural aquatic microbes and they stay alive in our bottle and get passed on to people's soils to eliminate fertilizer. The plants take care of the rest."
All natural ingredients are used, including hardwood Ash to aid in PH balance, hardwood pulp for potassium, fish effluents for overall soil enhancement and plant nutrition. The result is a significant increase in the overall health of your plants.
Right now it's a niche product for growers of products like cannabis, peppers or tomatoes and people that want a flavanoid taste from their fruit.
"We also noticed that it gives a lot more flowers to the plant and that translates into more fruit," Croxall explains. "A lot of farmers that were growing a lot, and had a good understanding of their plants, also noticed that there were different flavour profiles that came out."
That led the company to partner with the labs at Flemming College to find out what Mother Nature has going on in the bottle.
"They've been working wonders for us," adds Croxall. "Now we believe we can actually eliminate man-made fertilizers for a lot of consumers. It's not necessarily commercial grade right now because soy and corn farmers will still, over time, need to build biological soil, but this is a good intro."
The concentrate sells for $99 a bottle and will do a 100-square-foot garden for an entire year with a 40:1 ratio of concentrate to water.
"So if you are growing vegetables for a family of four and you have a 10 by 10 garden this will inoculate your garden soil. Plants over time, when they are ready, will make their own nitrogen so we're just allowing them to make nitrogen, you don't have to force them,"
Croxall has been running the business for six years and says it's been great.
"Lots of learning curves, We spent a year and a half learning data and what's important, how to make money. We're ready to hit the market in the spring."
He calls the experience at the government-sponsored Northern Ontario Pavilion "fantastic"
"Without this, I don't think we would have been able to do it. Sales have been minor because we're at an agricultural centre selling fertilizer, so the connection is a little bit harder because so many people have cows and cattle here, but making connections has been wonderful."
