Every gardener wants to keep the garden fresh, healthy and productive, and the best way to maintain that level of health is with fertilizer. Store-bought fertilizer tends to be expensive, but you can keep your garden in optimum health by making your own fertilizer. Hunting down the ingredients may take some time, but your plants and your wallet will thank you for it.
Finding Ingredients
According to Steve Solomon, avid vegetable grower and author of nine books on gardening, the best ingredients for a homemade, organic fertilizer are seed meal; agricultural lime; dolomitic lime; bone meal, rock phosphate or guano; and kelp meal. These items provide just the right amount of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium needed in a fertilizer to correct the pH balance without dousing the soil with chemicals.
Seed meal and lime are found in farm stores or can be ordered from an agricultural supplier. Bone and kelp meal, rock phosphates and guano should be found in garden centers or can be ordered online. Buy these items in bulk. This will be expensive, but a little of the mix goes a long way. Buying these ingredients in bulk will ensure that you have enough fertilizer for two or three years.
You have a choice between using bone meal, rock phosphates or guano. All three provide the proper amount of phosphate for the fertilizer and can substitute for each other at any time. Bone meal is the easiest item to find, and guano is extremely rich in phosphate and other trace elements.
Mixing the Fertilizer
Mix by volume 4 parts seed meal to ½ part agricultural lime. Even better, if you can find it, is to mix ¼ part agricultural lime and ¼ part gypsum to 4 parts seed meal. Add to your mix ½ part dolomitic lime. Then mix in 1 part bone meal, rock phosphate or guano to ½ to 1 part kelp meal.
To bring down the cost of this mix, you can substitute grass clippings for the seed meal, but be warned that grass clippings do not elicit the same strong growing response as the seed meal will.
Spread 4 to 6 quarts of the mix over every 100 square feet of garden. The mixture is extremely potent, so only use as much as you need.
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