Which fertilizer to use for what?

Dustykitten

I really need to understand feeding plants/soil more. I try to be as organic as possible. Currently I do the following:

Make compost at home - it's not great, don't get much, use for soil improvement.

Buy farmyard manure to dig in veg patches/spread around soft fruit

Chuck Pelleted Chicken Poo about in the borders

Feed the lawn with an organic lawn feed

Use the worm liquid to water tubs

Chop up banana skins and lay them around plants an old guy told me to do this for the potassium.

I have used Blood fish and bone and epson salts before but not sure why or what for with hindsight.


The thing is I understand roughly what NPK is but don't know the ratio in any of these things (well it probably is on the packet for the PPM but I've decanted it.

What I really need to know which plants need what ration and which products supply this eg I've found out that dahlias need a ratio of 5-10-10 but which product supplies this?

Can anybody point me in the direction of a good site to help.

Thanks if you have read this far and well done if you have understood a word of it :cool::cool:

emiff6

This is a good site for a basic explanation of which products contain what fertilisers:
http://www.nvsuk.org.uk/growing_show_vegetables_1/fertilisers.php

If your soil has compost and well rotted manure added, and the blood, fish and bonemeal, it should have a fair proportion of NPK and most plants will take what they need and be healthy.

Blood, fish and bonemeal is a slow release and more organic form of NPK. Epsom salts is magnesium sulphate and is supposed to add magnesium to the soil:

http://gardening.about.com/od/organicgardenin1/f/Epsom_Salts.htm

HTH

(I don't use anything with fishmeal in, since it mostly comes from fish harvested solely for the purpose of turning into garden fertiliser, which would otherwise be food for other marine creatures - I don't want to be involved in depleting the earth's oceans just to grow bigger veg!)

valk_scot

I don't feel that specific feeding is that useful, unless you're either growing greenhouse crops or trying to win the local show with your mammoth veg. Home made compost & well rotted manure, dug in or used as a mulch, covers most of the bases when it comes to general plant nutrition. A wormery is useful to use up things you can't compost and comfrey and seaweed (extract or fresh) can provide extra micronutrients, either in the form of liquid feed or chucked in the compost bins. The old adage of feed the soil rather than feed the plants is one of the underpinnings of organic gardening, remember. Keep your soil in good heart and you don't need to bother about the actual chemistry of it.

Aless

emiff6 I did not know that about fish blood and bone, I had rather naively hoped that it was waste products from what was caught any way!

Dustykitten

Aless wrote: »

emiff6 I did not know that about fish blood and bone, I had rather naively hoped that it was waste products from what was caught any way!

That is what I assumed too. I won't get it again either now.

Sambucus_Nigra

And pelleted chicken poo is usually sold to support battery farming

Dustykitten

Sambucus_Nigra wrote: »

And pelleted chicken poo is usually sold to support battery farming

Oh I hadn't thought of that either of course it is. Right that's another thing to strike of the list.

So is there anything that is friendly/organic? Horse manure from local stable is obviously fine and juice from my own wormery.

valk_scot

Dustykitten wrote: »

So is there anything that is friendly/organic? Horse manure from local stable is obviously fine and juice from my own wormery.

Grow comfrey (Bocking 14 is the one recommended by the Henry Doubleday because it's non-invasive) and gather seaweed from above the tide line. Rinse the seaweed by either leaving it out in the rain or hosing it then you can dig it in, use it as a mulch or add it to the compost bin. You can make liquid fertilizer from comfrey or use it in compost. Nettles make a good liquid fertilizer too. But the main thing to do is make as much compost as possible...I make two cubic metres of compost a year on average and could use twice that tbh.

emiff6

There's a little silvery fish called a menhaden, a fish in the herring family, and it lives on plankton. Adult fish can filter up to four gallons of water a minute, and they play an important role in clarifying ocean water. They swim in large schools and are eaten by a variety of predators including bluefish, bass, cod, haddock, halibut, mackerel, tuna, and swordfish.


And this is what we do to it:
http://www.rainyside.com/resources/fishfert.html

rabidbun

Argh, i've been buying orgnic chicken pellets thinking they were non battery because of the name... And had just started using blood, fish and bone too.

How much fertilizer does Comfrey or nettles make? Needing to grow enough for 50 pots and equivalent of 6 square metres if I use this to replace.

valk_scot

rabidbun wrote: »

How much fertilizer does Comfrey or nettles make? Needing to grow enough for 50 pots and equivalent of 6 square metres if I use this to replace.

Well, I grow ten Bocking 14 plants which take up a 12ft x 4ft bed, cut it four times a year and shove it in an old water butt. Each butt full of leaves makes about 25 litres of neat juice which I dilute down 15 pts water to 1 pt juice, then use it as a foliar feed twice a week for anything on the allotment that's actively growing except salad plants and potatoes. The leaf residue goes on the compost bin or bean trench. Nettle fertilizer is made much the same way and I usually make one butt of that a year.

It is a long term project though to grow comfrey. Start a bed off now and you'll be into the swing of it next year. My allotment is 40' x 80', if that's any help?

If you're just watering pots though I'd go straight for a Miracle Grow system clipped onto the hose once per week if I were you. This year anyway! Comfrey alone won't feed pot grown plants, if you're using multipurpose compost. Multipurpose compost is to all intents and purposes exhausted of nutrients after six weeks of steady plant growth and you need to put everything in after that and the only way you're going to do that is chemically. Miracle Grow liquid feed, slow release granules, slow release sticks etc. Pots are a lot harder to look after than garden soil.