Beside the Stream

I routinely buy dried blood, bat guano, kelp, volcanic dust, and worm castings for the garden… and I’m not the only one.  Many gardeners believe in the possibility of a perfect supplement.  The latest and greatest supplement, though, is so far-fetched that people are keeping quiet about it around here.  It’s the commercial growers who bought it first, at $250 for five gallons.  Home growers could get the $23 size–still a lot for a supplement–and I see that they now have a $15 size for the house.  The garden club split a bottle 8 ways, so I’ve been using it for a month.      

 EM•1 includes ”enzymes, bio-available trace minerals, vitamins, and live naturally occurring beneficial microorganisms” (it’s EM for Effective Microorganisms).  It is classic  pixie dust: you don’t know quite what it is; it doesn’t look like anything interesting; and it takes care of everything. (The pixie dust graphic is from here.)

You use a few drops at a time.  EM•1 keeps the water in vases sweet, so cut flowers last much longer.  A drop in the water for houseplants makes them much happier.  Plants don’t shock during transplant if you dip their roots in a bucket of treated water.  The vegetable garden looks more bodacious.  The garden pond is more vibrant.  I think I’m using it everywhere, and then Suzy asked, have you tried it in the toilet?  It cleans the toilet bowl. 

So I tried it, and it’s absolutely true: when you let a few drops sit in the toilet bowl for a few hours, it ends up clean.  It’s a probiotic cleaner that, according to their literature, also works on the septic tank and the stove. 

But the best cleaning trick is that EM•1 removes all odor from a wet dog.  My dog keeps cool in the summer by dipping into the ditch, so by August she can get pretty ripe.  I rubbed a few drops in water into the dog’s coat, and she became–and stayed–odor free. 

Now that’s pixie dust.