Growing Green: Young and Hungry (Tip #7)

So far I've talked about grow zones, amending soil, planting seeds, water, and light. Then I walked through the hardening off process. Now your plants are strong enough to survive in the great outdoors. The next post should technically be about transplanting, but I'm going to go a little out of order and speak about the granular fertilizer that I use on my plants once they are in the garden. I'm doing this before the post about transplanting seedlings because I use this fertilizer when transplanting them and think it may be helpful to talk about fertilizer before anyone needs to use it. 

In the off chance that you're following along and doing these things as I post about them (that is, at the same time that I am actually doing them in my own garden), I want to make sure I don't send you out needing to use fertilizer before explaining a few things first.

My Favorite Fertilizer:

I posted about the Espoma Organic Garden-tone fertilizer when I talked about amending soil. It's a great all-purpose fertilizer that is cost effective, especially when purchased in 50-lb. bags online. (Not everyone is going to have a need for that much fertilizer, but I'm mentioning it so that you know it's an option.)

Now that my compost pile is up and ready for use, I do anticipate that I'll need less of this granular, but it was sufficient in previous years, before compost was as plentiful for me. 

*Note, if you'd rather opt for fertilizing with compost alone and don't have a pile yourself, the local nurseries (Windsor, Kimberly, and Webb) all offer compost by the yard. You can take a truck and pick up a load yourself or have it delivered for a fee. That is the route I took until this year.

When using Garden-Tone, I fertilize my seedlings according to package directions and do recommend paying attention to those in the beginning. Too much fertilizer and you’ll burn the plants, too little and they’ll become sad and anemic looking. As plants mature they will be less sensitive but in the beginning I always have a "less is more" mindset where fertilizer is concerned. 

However, there are a few crops that are super heavy-feeders. These varieties will appreciate all the fertilizer. These heavy feeders are tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, broccoli, and corn. For years my heavy-feeder plants were stunted--then I learned that they need a lot of fertilizer to thrive.

These days I follow a simple fertilizing schedule: my heavy-feeders get some fertilizer sprinkled every 2 weeks, everything else gets it once per month. I try to do it around the same time each month to avoid over-fertilizing, but a few days in either direction isn't likely to hurt anything. 

Signs of Under-Nourished Plants:

When trying to explain signs of plant issues, I think a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are photos of each situation pertaining to fertilizer. It's clear that this first photo is of a plant that is losing its green-ness (languishing). This happens when a plant grows and uses up the available nutrients in the soil: 

Nutrient-deficient squash plant

To keep plants as happy as they can be, productive and flourishing, you'll need to supply them with additional nutrients to replenish what they are using up.

Signs of Over-Fertilized Plants:

And now the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm sure you can look at the photo below and guess that this plant has been burned in some way.  This is what fertilizer burn looks like: 

Squash plant with fertilizer burn

If you do overly-fertilize your plants, don't despair. Rinse the soil thoroughly with water. If the plants are still in their grow pots, put them under a tap and let water run through the pot. Remove any remaining fertilizer residue that you are able to see. 

If your plants are already in the garden you can sometimes take a trowel and scrape some of the fertilizer off the top. That will keep more fertilizer from working its way to your plant and causing further damage. You can then remove the damaged leaves if it hurts you to look at them. The most important thing is to cut back on fertilizing for a while, to allow your plant the chance to recover.

The Well-Nourished Plant:

A well-fertilized plant will have healthy green leaves, though vegetables all have a different depth of green to them. Tomatoes are a deeper green than squash, for example. As long as the plant is growing and not showing signs of distress, you're doing great. 

Well-fertilized squash plants. Green and healthy leaves with no signs of stress.

Other Amendments:

There are so many kinds of amendments to give your plants! You can add blood meal for nitrogen, bone meal for phosphorus and micronutrients, or lime to make the soil less acidic and more alkaline.

I never need to use lime because my soil is already pretty alkaline, but I do love to use soil acidifier for creating a more acidic environment for berries.

I've grown strawberries since my first year gardening, but only branched out to blueberries in the past couple of years. The first year I was able to keep the plants alive but not much else happened. I spent the winter learning how to care for blueberries. Turns out, they're kinda fussy. If you want your blueberries to thrive, they need their soil to be super acidified. My soil has a natural pH of around 6.5 - 7.0 and blueberries want somewhere around 4.5. As I began using this soil acidifier things started really growing:

Mulch, mulch, mulch:

The last amendment that I'll talk about is not strictly an amendment but becomes one as it decomposes. I'm talking about mulch! 

I always apply a heavy layer of grass or straw mulch to my garden beds after transplanting seedlings. I do this to block fungal spores from reaching the leaves of my plants and also to keep the soil from drying out on hot days. But there is a third benefit of mulching your plants: the mulch slowly decomposes and adds nutritients back into the soil! 

I didn't mulch in the early years of gardening, mostly because I wasn't looking to add any more expenses and didn't know if it would be worth it. Then about 4 years ago, I heard two of my gardening mentors talking about mulching with grass clippings. They said that every time they shared this tip, they got messages from many concerned followers asking whether they were inadvertently spreading weed seeds into their beds. They both assured everyone that, for some reason unknown, it doesn't. I decided to give it a try, though we had so many weeds in our lawn at that time thanks to our free irrigation water, full of weed seeds! 

I mulched my entire garden that year with dandelion-ridden grass clippings, putting a lot of trust in these Instagram gardeners. To my surprise, no dandelion plants grew in my beds! 

Fall Compost Cover:

Just one more thing I do to fertilize my garden: Each fall, after the garden is put to bed for winter, I spread a 3-4 inch layer of compost on top of each bed. This is a topper that lays on the soil and leaches nutrients down into it over the course of the winter. By the time spring rolls around, the compost has finished breaking down and is ready to be lightly mixed with the top inch or two of soil beneath it. While I don't till my soil, I do work the compost in a little, marrying the two layers and creating a loose mixture to transplant seedlings into.

And that's how I fertilize my garden! Using compost and all-purpose fertilizers I have been able to grow a happy garden. Gardening experts fuss with individual supplements, and maybe some day I'll do a soil test and jump on that train. For now, I'm happy with this method.