The products made from bones - bone meal and bone flour, according to how fine the particles are ground - and intended for horticultural use, have to be quite clear of a dreadful disease called anthrax.
The first point to realize is that, in dry conditions, both peat tailings - usually taken to mean the more- coarse pieces that do not pass through a sieve when granulated peat is being prepared from the raw `as dug’ - and bark have a quite prodigious ability to absorb moisture. Even more than they soak it up from whatever surrounds them, they will attract and draw it up and sideways through the soil from some distance away.
The number of bacteria which can get to work will be limited at first by the superficial surface area of bone that is exposed, and the only way in which the decomposition can be speeded up is to increase the surface area. So, instead of leaving big bones all over the place, they are ground into small pieces, and ground to the size of sawdust are called meal.
The bulk is the same but the total surface area is much greater and more bacteria can get to work. Grinding even smaller to the consistency of flour further increases the area exposed, but it still takes months to complete the journey.
All plant and animal matter is comprised of chemical compounds that are much more complex and elaborated than the simple chemicals which, dissolved in water, were first absorbed by a plant, worked up into the structure of the plant and perhaps eaten and further worked up into the even more complicated compounds of animal body structure. Some animal structure is concentrated and contains plenty of the same elements that are essential for plant growth. Bone contains a lot of phosphorus and plants need phosphorus in their roots so, logically, putting bones into the soil is a good nutrient source.
However, bone is a very long way from the phosphorus solutions that plants can absorb. It has to be decomposed and broken down by soil bacteria, and that is a long process, involving very many stages and different bacteria at each stage in what is called a bacterial chain.
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