A Better Way to Fertilize Your Garden - Homemade Organic Fertilizer
(Page 2 of 6)
June/July 2006
By Steve Solomon
Bone meal is usually available at garden centers. Guano, rock phosphate and kelp meal may seem costly or difficult to obtain, but they add considerable fortitude to the plants and increase the nutritional content of your vegetables. Go as far down the recipe as you can afford, but if you can’t find the more exotic materials toward the bottom, don’t worry too much. However, if concerns about money stop you from obtaining kelp meal, rock dust or a phosphate supplement, I suggest taking a hard look at priorities. In my opinion, you can’t spend too much money creating maximum nutrition in your food — a dollar spent here will save several in health care costs over the long term.
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Applying the Fertilizer Mix
Before planting each crop, or at least once a year (preferably in the spring), uniformly broadcast 4 to 6 quarts of fertilizer mix atop each 100 square feet of raised bed, or down each 50 feet of planting row in a band 12 to 18 inches wide. Blend in the fertilizer with a hoe or spade. This amount provides sufficient fertility for what I’ve classified as “low-demand” vegetables to grow to their maximum potential and is usually enough to adequately feed “medium-demand” vegetables (see “Which Crops Need the Most”). If you’re planting in hills, mix an additional cup of fertilizer into each.
After the initial application, sprinkle small amounts of fertilizer around medium- and high-demand vegetables every three to four weeks, thinly covering the area that the root system will grow into. As the plants grow, repeat this “side-dressing,” placing each dusting farther from their centers. Each application will require more fertilizer than the previous. As a rough guide, side-dress about 4 to 6 additional quarts total per 100 square feet of bed during a crop cycle. If the growth rate fails to increase over the next few weeks, the most recent application wasn’t needed, so don’t add any more.
Chemical Cautions
Nonorganic synthetic fertilizers should come with labels warning against giving plants too much. One reason I don’t recommend the use of chemical fertilizers is that it’s too easy for inexperienced gardeners to cross the line between just enough and too much.
Chemical fertilizers are too pure. This is particularly true of inexpensive chemical blends — even so-called “complete” chemical fertilizers are entirely incomplete. They supply only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Unless the manufacturer intentionally puts in other essential minerals, the chemical mix won’t supply them. Especially troublesome is that chemical fertilizers rarely contain calcium or magnesium, which plants need in large amounts along with tiny traces of several other minerals. Plants lacking any essential nutrients are more easily attacked by insects and diseases, contain less nourishment for you and often don’t grow as well as they could.
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