so if I was a lazy Organic Gardener I could just sprinkle dry milk powder on my melon patch and Voila, bigger better happier melons?
Really interesting thread
My daughter and I use to attend a Laura Ingalls Wilder festival, I even made outfits for them to wear. Good memories and they learned so much about pioneer life, I am sure it stuck with them , they bring it up every now and then.

So----If I have sour milk, I can dump it in the compost pile? What about no meat or dairy in the compost pile?

My giant pumpkin stem has split at the base of the plant. Should I tape the split closed or how should I repare it? The plant shows no sign of diying.

Altagarden
MI Z4-5

ALTAGARDEN - If the pumpkin is showing no stress, leave the stem as is - it with form a scar on its own.
The dairy in the compost pile - that rule is to prevent attracting critters to the pile, but if your compost is cooking, there is no problem with tossing sour milk in.

While you'd be giving the microbes in the soil a boost, and adding nutrients that the plants can use, I dunno about getting bigger melons... although any kind of nutrient addition will help the plants flourish, it may not help to the size you're thinking of!
You know, I've always been fascinated by pioneer ways. I read Ingalls books again and again - the last time I went through the collection, I was in my late twenties!
There is something about how she wrote that paints the scenes in my head. Does anybody know if there is anything on Laura's later life, after they reached the Ozarks?

Kosher person checking in here. It doesn't matter what you feed the plants, they are still parve (neither meat nor dairy). Now if you injected milk into the fruit right before harvesting, it would have actual milk in it and would be reguarded as dairy. The injunction is against cooking a calf in its mother's milk, which is considered not a nice thing, as the milk was meant to feed the calf. There are other rules derived from this to safeguard against this remotely happening and to emphasize the spiritual effect so we guard ourselves from being unfeeling. We also are not allowed to take baby birds from the nest without first shooing the mother away. As far as the water here in the city of New York, when we had a good filter (left behind accidentally in a move) we used to find gobs of brown gunk when we changed the filter, so filtering the water is not a bad idea, with or without crustaceans in it.

Thank you GardenDmpls for your thoughtfull answer.
jo

milk fed pumpkins is a agracultural myth.
It has been proven to have no validity many times.
Congrats on falling for 100 plus year all myth/hoax.

Thanks, Mark, for calling me stupid, again. Have you tried the milk fed pumpkin technique, or are you just throwing rocks again?

I do believe that Mark may be right. Nutrients need to occur in a form that plants absorb-milk is not in that form. Plants cannot digest it. Composting the milk would be a better bet.

I am telling both of you that it does work, and it has worked for me personally for 12 years of growing pumpkins. I have tried it with powdered skim milk, weak compost tea, and half-strength fish emulsion fertilizer. If you had tried it, and it didn't work for you personally, that is one thing.
Now I'm even more determined to milk-feed a pumpkin and post pictures of the technique and the results. You won't beleive it anyway, but I will do it.

You may have gotton lucky that year when you used milk.
Sorry, but scientific evidence has proven that plants cannot digest milk.

I think it is the continual source of water, and any trace proteins and minerals in the feed jar that do it. I know the plants are not digesting the milk - they'd need a stomach to do that with.

loamlump First i never said you where stupid i just said you fell for a hoax.
second if the increase in growth is due to water in the milk, then the milk does not work and you get same result by watering more often.
So the milk does not work just how you water it does.

Oh how I wish my vines would get growing so I can demostrate! Its been very cool and wet so far this year. I've been waiting for a female blosom to set so I can use the technique. I'd like to do three this year, one with powdered milk, one with compost tea, and one fish fertilizer.
And I did say the vine picks up trace elements and proteins with the H2O in the milk.
(p.s. I'm sorry I got offended, markferon. I'm not having a good year and tings are getting worse - I'm taking alot of lumps.)

alot of lumps. you need to stir the gravy ,mash the potatoes, hoe longer to get rid all those lumps.