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.
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