Full Circle News

Accident leads to organic plant food

By Colleen Slater, KP News

Steve Wortinger, former Master Gardener, landscape designer and general contractor, was hired to do Bio-remediation for a time. He cleaned up oil spills with bacteria and microbes.

He expected the ground would be unusable for plants after the spill was cleaned up. The opposite was true.

“Plants and grass grew like crazy,” he says.

A realization “came out of the blue” that the bacteria and microbes didn’t eat the oil, but broke it down into amino acids with their enzymes.

He and his associates set up an experiment. In a 1,100-gallon barrel, they put sand, water and crude oil, then added microbes and let it sit. When Wortinger eventually turned on the spigot near the bottom, out came a fluid that looked like apple juice. He took some home and put it on a few plants.

“The plants died but not the roots, and a new plant came up and grew well,” he says.

He had the world record sunflower, with over 120 seeds on one plant, but he didn’t know it. Ten years later a grower gained the Guiness Record with more seeds. Wortinger figured he was onto something, but this was the mid ‘90s, and the state of Washington wouldn’t register it. No permission would be granted for pouring oil on the ground.

He says there was no oil left in the product, no hydro-carbons.

It was fulvic acid that looked like apple juice, but he only learned that later.

“Fulvic acid is the most complex compound in a plant,” Wortinger says, “like liquid sunshine.”

He developed a specific formula, which is intellectual domain, and was in business in Anacortes at first.

He and partners Tim Heitzman and Sean Bonsell now market it on the Key Peninsula, where he currently works and lives.

The product, carried by Sunnycrest Nursery and the Indoor Garden Store in Key Center, is called Full Circle Plant and Soil Food. The name is based on the circle of life that occurs naturally on our earth, including plants, organisms, and animals.

“We shop for ingredients,” Wortinger says, with the best quality rather than cheapest cost.

Kelp, fish hydroxylate (that still contains the oils and omegas), chitosan from shrimp and crabs, “liquid feathers” and Chilian nitrates are all included in his formula.

His green lawn, healthy trees and gardens demonstrate the use of his product. His recommended usage is with wormcasting compost tea.

“There are millions more species (of organisms) in worm compost than in manure,” he says.

Native trees and plants in our current environment become stressed, says Wortinger. Trees de-stressed with his plant food pop out new branches between the old, uncommon in the plant world.

Wortinger, a certified arborist, can carry a 200-gallon sprayer in his truck to use his worm compost and Full Circle plant and soil food. He recently cut a 155-year old tree not far from the Herron ferry dock. It was beyond help from his plant and soil food, but there are many more trees and garden plants on the Key he believes can benefit from his creation.