How to Use Alfalfa Pellets in Your Fall & Spring Garden Beds as Your Organic Fertilizer- Save Money!

Welcome to the Rusted Garden Homestead. Today I'm going to show you how to use alfalfa pellets to prep your garden beds in the fall and you can do this in the spring. I will be doing that for 2021. Now this is a wonderful organic granular type fertilizer. It's all you really need. You can save yourself hundreds of dollars by just buying these 50 pound bags of alfalfa pellets. And what you want to look for is the main ingredient should just be alfalfa hay. 50 pounds. This is going to cost you $15 for a bag like this. 50 pounds for $15. You can buy alfalfa meal. It's this product here ground up into a powder or into flakes. That's going to cost you anywhere from six to twelve dollars for five to eight pounds. The same exact ingredients. Go to your feed stores get these 50 pound bags. This one bag will probably be able to set up my entire garden for the fall. I'll use another bag in the spring. That's 30 bucks to take care of, you know, my garden. That's really really inexpensive. The only thing that would beat that is being able to make your own compost for free. Now before we get to putting the pellets down, why are alfalfa pellets so wonderful for your garden? Well they're inexpensive, but it's not just about saving money. It's inexpensive and it's full of nutrition for your garden. It has the main nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in there. Other micronutrients, calcium, sulfur, magnesium. It has trace minerals, growth stimulants. It's wonderful for all the microorganisms in your soil because it contains protein, sugars, amino acids, and has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 24 to 1. And all that really means is that soil biology loves to digest all of this. Now it's a pellet, a general pellet. When it expands you add water it's going to look something like that. So this is going to expand. I recommend putting this down, you know, the day before it rains because these are food pellets so it's possible that some animals will want to come and eat this. If it rains, mixes it into the soil, you have less of a problem like that. Or you can just water it in. It's up to you. But if you can catch a rainy day, you're going to put the alfalfa pellets down the day before it rains. Let's go over some more facts real quick. So the N, P, and K ratio of the alfalfa is on the low end 2.8 nitrogen, 0.29 phosphorus, 2.4 potassium. The average is a 3.12 N, P, K fertilizer. That's wonderful. That's perfect for a slow and low organic fertilizer. If we were going to be planting into a planting hole, dropping a tomato plant, it's about a half a cup per planting hole. Generally speaking, 2 to 3 pounds. This container weighs 2.4 pounds filled with the material. This is a half gallon milk container. 2 to 3 pounds per 100 square feet. Now again this container has 2.4 pounds of material in it of the alfalfa pellets or 1,100 grams. It's pretty simple to use this. So the question I always get is if you're going to try and figure out 2 to 3 pounds per 100 square feet, how does that work? All right, so this raised bed, this garden space, is about 3 feet wide. It's 6 feet long. 3 times 6 is 18. That's 18 square feet right here. That's 18 square feet. That's not a lot of space. It's 2 to 3 pounds per 100 square feet. This two-quart container holds two and a half pounds. So it can be kind of complicated to measure out all your space, multiply, you know, figure out what fraction of this to use. So I'm just going to show you visually how to drop it down. When it goes down, it's going to be dry like I was saying. And when you add water, it ends up looking something like this. When you drop it down, you can go ahead and mix it into the soil if you want, water it in. But again, pick a rainy day. All right, so let me just show you what this would look like visually, prepping it for the fall. The last thing that's important, real quick, is if you're doing this in the spring, you want to give the alfalfa pellets 30 to 60 days to break down and kind of get incorporated into your soil for the spring. In the fall, I really recommend doing this when you have 4 or 5 months of your bed sitting at rest, because this will really break down nicely. It will be ready to go for your spring plantings. And then when you drop this down in the spring, the alfalfa pellets that get dropped in the spring will begin to break down, but they're really going to give back to the plant over later spring and mid-summer. So you're really kind of feeding your garden for immediate planting by putting this down in the fall. It'll break down over 4 months, and then you're putting it down again in the spring so that you can feed your plant through, you know, the middle of the summer. So I'll show you how to take care of all three of these beds. They're all 3 feet by 6 feet, so that's 18, 18, and 18. That's 54 square feet. That's going to be about a half to three quarters of this container. And all you're doing is sprinkling it down something like that. You know, visually, just like you can see the green in there. That's it. You know, you don't have to really go and measure every bed and weigh everything out. Just do something like that. Again, you could use a little more if you want. And this is how much I've used out of the container. Not a whole lot. In fact, I want to use a little bit more, right down the middle. Alright, let's go over to this bed. So that was 18 square feet. Same thing for this one. You can see that it's pretty good coverage. And there's nothing wrong with using more. I mean, if you wanted to really lay it on there, you could do that. It's all going to break down. So in the fall, we're doing this, at least in my zone, Maryland Zone 7, with four to five months before I'd be planting in there. That's plenty of time for this to really start breaking down. And when the warmth comes, the soil microbiology will break it down more, and it will really give back to my plants in that spring, later spring. When we put this down again, in the spring, this will still need time to break down. And this will feed the plants, you know, later into the summer. You can go ahead and drop it right on your beds. That's kohlrabi, some arugula, rosemary. This is not going to damage your plant leaves. It's not going to burn the plant roots. And that's all you do. So we used a little more than half, 54 square feet, two to three pounds per 100 square feet. That's pretty much on target. So you can just kind of visually take a look at how I dropped everything. And that's what you want to do throughout your beds. You're not going to hurt your plants if you do more. So here is a one-stig bed that I grew tomato plants in. I put leaves down already. You can put this right on beds that you've already prepared, maybe with grass, with leaves. I've been doing stuff with wood ash. Same process, just sprinkle it across the top and just let it get rained in. By adding these greens into the leaves, that's going to help with the composting when the warmer weather comes. All right, let's go over to my other beds and I'll show you one more example. So this is where I'm making my leaf mold, my leaf compost. This was filled to the top about six weeks ago and it's dropped down over time. That's what it does. I put alfalfa pellets in here about four weeks ago and you can see some of the expanded pellets. Now because we're into late fall, I've had freezing nights, this isn't really going to break down that quickly. That's why in the fall you want four or five months for the pellets to be put into the ground. Let them just start mixing into everything and when the warmth returns, they're going to be there ready to supply your compost pile or your garden with what it needs to really grow plants or to break down. So that's one way you can use the pellets too, is you can mix them into your compost, into your piles as the greens, and if it's warm enough they will help activate it and will help with hot composting. So this bed is four feet by six feet, that's 24 square feet. I just quickly cleared it out. Weeds can be in there, that's perfectly fine. The ground is frozen, it's actually December 31st today and it's the same process, just sprinkle it down. I'm going to put a little more into here because these are new beds and I want a little more fertilizer in there. Again it just has to look something like that and you've got your bed set up for the fall, for its winter sleep, and it is really really inexpensive to use the alfalfa feed pellets. I mean I really want you to save a lot of money. Look that's all we used for this space and in fact we could put more in there. I mean we're probably at like 30 to 40 cents a pound, less than that. It's really really inexpensive and that one bag will be able to set up all my beds for the fall, for its fall slumber. I mean it's so cheap and I know I'm kind of sticking to that point but there's no need to buy all that bagged organic fertilizer when you can use alfalfa pellets, you can use compost, and you can find alternatives to spending a lot of money. All right let's go back over to the main bag and we'll finish up. I just wanted to cut in real quick. Everything you're seeing now I fed with that 50 pound bag of alfalfa pellets. If you want to click ahead to the more factual stuff go ahead but I want to just walk through here for about 45 seconds. So for $15.99 every fabric pot, every raised bed, every earth bed that you see got the alfalfa pellets and I was heavy-handed so I actually gave them more than kind of what's recommended but you know take that with a grain of salt. Drop them down along my asparagus. They are in each of these containers. You can see them in there. You know heavy-handed you don't have to over worry. Drop them down right on beds that I've already prepared with leaves and grass. Put it right on the burlap. The only place I didn't put them obviously is on top of these covers because the alfalfa pellets aren't going to sink into the earth. These are experiments so I'm leaving them there for other reasons. All the raised beds and I just went through and just dropped down handfuls across the way. I even did the bases of the blackberry plants, all the blueberry plants, all these containers. As you get to the bottom you can see that it's going to start to flake and be less pellets. Fed the hops vines along the back of the fence, my different grapes and muscadines that I have in here, even my fig plant. Those are muscadines in between those containers. But that 50 pound bag was enough to feed all the growing space in my garden. $15.99. That's pretty pretty cheap. To give you an idea of 100 square feet, this space right here is 125 square feet of plantable surface. So it's about one of these containers, two and a half pounds sprinkled across here. That will set this bed up for the fall slumber and again in the spring I would put down another you know two to three pounds right in here. That's plenty of organic fertilizer. That's a total use of what four to six pounds of this bag right over here. That's 50 pounds and only costs $15. And again if you're concerned about it being organic you have to call the company or you can buy specifically organic alfalfa meal and that's going to cost you about 20 bucks for 50 pounds. But this is really a great way to save yourself a ton of money and give your garden beds and plants what they need to thrive and grow come spring and summer. Thanks for watching. I hope you consider this. It's not a hack. You know this is just common sense. This will save you a lot of money. If you look in your organic fertilizer bags of the different blends you're going to see alfalfa meal often as one of the ingredients in there. So you're already using it. You're just paying way too much for it. Thanks for watching and please check out my seed shop at therustedgarden.com.