Does fish fertilizer work? You decide

As the main contributor to this gardening blog, I get plenty of unsolicited e-mails telling me about garden products, books and sometimes a few non-gardening items, as well. Occasionally, someone sends something to the newspaper, too. The latest product to come my way as keeper of the gardening blog was a box containing two bottles of fish rich fertilizer.
One is organic and the other is not. Frankly, when I see something all packaged, processed and pretty, but with an organic label, I'm immediately skeptical. From what I've read about nutrition, it's not the added fertilizers and pesticides that cause the most harm to our bodies, but the added processing and packaging. But I won't go there today...

I decided to give this fertilizer a try and let my readers decide if it did any good. I'm using my straw bales as test plots because they were looking puny, as you can see from the before pictures, which I placed on the left. I took the after pictures six days after applying the fertilizer.

This is my bale containing one sweet potato plant and one big Jim pepper.  

This bale has one melon plant (I can't remember what kind of melon) and one sweet pepper plant. And no, I can't remember the exact type of sweet pepper, either. I think it's a gypsy hybrid. 

And last, but not least, this one has a spaghetti squash in back and a big Jim in front. 

Oops. Sorry, that was not the last photo. I mixed an entire gallon 

of fertilizer and had some left over, so I decided to fertilize my straw bales at the community garden.

So, whaddya think? Are the results amazing, a-snoozing, astounding? I dunno. Stuff looks bigger, but whether that's simply because it's had an additional week of sunshine and extra water (I've been watering my bales at home almost daily) is anybody's guess. 

The best-looking straw bales didn't even get the fish fertilizer. 

They do, however, get lots of water, since the kids at Kids of the Kingdom preschool water at least twice a day. 

At least we've got a definitive answer to the question of whether or not straw bale gardening will work in Western Colorado. Yes!

OK, so this really is the last pic for this post. Look! A baby spaghetti squash!  This plant wasn't producing fruit before I fertilized with Fish Rich and now it is. The kids' pumpkins are loaded.  Even without the fish fertilizer.