Lemons, limes and chicken poo

There's a farmyard scent in the air right now in our garden, so Pammy's gone out shopping for the day. Yep, it's citrus feeding time once again, folks, and the nostril-poking "wake-up!" scent of chicken poo fills the air. It only lasts a few days, but that familiar, twice-a-year smell imprints itself on my memory as powerfully as the colours of seasonal flowers. 

The memorably well-named chicken poo fertiliser product,
Dynamic Lifter, has been a mainstay of our garden for decades
now, but there's a new version that we're trying out, the
'reduced odour' Dynamic Lifter. Personally, I rank reduced
odour chicken poo up there with decaffeinated coffee and low-fat
cheese as a "why would anyone bother?" kind of offering, but
apparently some people like coffee without the drugs, and tasteless
cheese, and, unbelievably, chicken poo that doesn't stink.
Takes all types, thank goodness I am a tolerant liberal.

Anyway, on with the road test. It seems to me that the so-called 'reduced odour' chicken poo merely stinks to high heaven for a shorter period of time. It doesn't not stink, by any means. It just runs out of stink well before standard Dynamic Lifter does. So in that sense it's 'reduced odour' 

I use the souped-up version of Dynamic Lifter on my citrus trees. It's what they describe as 'Organic Based', rather than organic. That is, it contains a lot of chicken poo, plus some added extras designed to really get citrus fruiting.

The reduced odour Dynamic Lifter is labelled as 'organic'. That is, no fancy additives. I used the low-odour stuff in my vegie patch and to help a line of slow-growing gardenias along. The poor gardenias were planted in late spring and haven't enjoyed this hot, dry summer at all. They've grown just a bit, I've watered them a lot, and I'm hoping that the February rains plus the Dynamic Lifter will encourage them to grow a lot more this autumn. We'll see; if it works, then reduced odour Dynamic Lifter has passed its test.

As for the citrus, they'll bounce back from a yucky, over-dry summer. The general rule with feeding them here in temperate Sydney and elsewhere is to feed them twice a year, late summer and late winter. For me, that's February and August. I've used Dynamic Lifter for the last 20 years on my citrus trees and it'll do me.

I love that seasonal smell, Pammy doesn't, but it lasts just a few days.