My Approach To Fertilizing The Garden

Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden. Today we're going to be answering one of the questions that I get most frequently, which is how do I fertilize my garden and also what fertilizers do I like to use. So we're going to go over a couple different examples including the granular kind of slow release and then some of the liquid fertilizer and how to actually apply it. I'm also going to talk about different use cases whether you're potting up seedlings or growing in containers but first we're going to start with how to actually fertilize some tomatoes that are already growing in ground. So we're over here in the tomato jungle aka the Florida weed section and I've got my bag of tomato tone because we're going to be fertilizing these tomatoes. So there's a lot of different ways to kind of do this. At the beginning when I planted these I actually amended this whole bed with tomato tone so I had some of this slow release organic fertilizer to begin with. Now that's something I wanted to talk about a little bit because I only use organic fertilizers in my garden. Now synthetic fertilizers are synthetic because they're usually derived from petroleum products they're usually salts and what that means is that if you put a bunch of salts in your garden what that ends up doing is actually killing a lot of your soil life such as worms and beneficial bacteria and fungi especially worms actually can't really handle these salts very well at all so you actually end up doing a lot of harm to your garden. Now the advantage of a synthetic fertilizer is that once you put it in it's basically immediately ready to use. What that does is it creates this kind of reliance on having to consistently use it because the plants get an immediate hit of that fertility and then it's gone. So rather than doing that we like to use these slow release organic fertilizers because they are made from like certain things like poultry meal naturally derived products and instead of just being released all at once they release over time. So that's a great advantage it also actually makes your life easier because what that means is that I can apply this fertilizer and it'll continuously feed my plants for months, weeks, and at a time without me having to constantly reapply it. So what we're doing here is I'm moving the mulch away from my plants and then I'm going to be adding the fertilizer up against my drip line. What this is going to do is that every time the water drips it'll take some of that fertilizer from this slow release and it'll actually drip it into the soil below. So that's going to slowly and continuously feed my tomato plants every single time I water. Now the other thing I like to do is you could either like use something like a cobra head and sort of scratch it in or if you get a pair of gloves you could just get in there right with your hands. You want to work it into the soil a little bit because if it's sitting on top it's not going to be able to get into that soil and water very well. So I'm just going to go ahead kind of crunch it into the top layer of soil. You don't have to really worry about the roots from your plants because there's so many roots at this point in their life that any damage I do here it's going to be essentially nothing. So now you can see most of the fertilizer has sort of disappeared into the soil. I could come back and actually just cover it right back up with the mulch. That'll also help distribute the fertilizer better because the mulch will actually spread the water around. So that's all you have to do. You just move your mulch out of the way, mix it into the top layer of your soil and if I want I could also come by right now and water it in a little bit to get that first little hit of fertilizer to my potato plants. All right so that's actually all you really need to do to apply these slow release organic fertilizers. Let's go take a look at some liquids next. So now let's take a look at these liquids. In particular I've been a huge fan of AgroThrive. I've actually been using this now for at least two years. I found them a while ago and I decided it was a great product because it's much more available to your plants. That's one of the problems with synthetics versus organics is that some organics are so slow that they don't actually get into your plant. But the AgroThrive, what they do is they fully break it down and as soon as you add it to your plants it basically is able to use it much more rapidly. So let's grab this and I'll also grab a watering can and I'll show you two different ways that I actually use these liquid fertilizers to fertilize my garden. One of the reasons liquid fertilizers are so great is that they act a lot faster. So as we mentioned before the other kind of organic granular fertilizers are slow release. So they release over time depending on conditions in your garden and how much you water it basically. But when it comes to licking around your garden and saying oh man I have A. too many plants B. they look rough right now like they need something then liquid fertilizer is a great way to go because it's a lot easier to actually apply it across your garden especially when you have a device like this. So this is called a EasyFlow. The cool thing about this is that as I take my fertilizer in this case it's the AgroThrive fruit and flower because all of this is connected to my drip system. My drip system is watering my tomatoes and peppers. So those are heavy fruiting plants that need a little bit more potassium a little bit more phosphorus. So the cool thing about this is that you just pour in your fertilizer and what happens is one of these actually pushes water into the system and the other one pulls it out. So the beauty of this is it acts as a siphon. So whenever I turn on my drip irrigation the really neat thing is that it'll automatically dilute and push this liquid fertilizer through every part of my garden that's on drip. So that's a really wonderful solution if you have drip and you have it set up in that way. Now let's say you don't have that big of a garden or maybe you don't have drip or you don't want to hook up something like this EasyFlow you could also just pour your fertilizer into a watering can dilute it immediately with water and then just take this can walk around your garden and fertilize your plants. This is really great especially if you have containers because with containers they're often not hooked up to irrigation. So as we walk over here I have three pepper plants and a peanut plant. You can see the peanut looks like it's sort of finishing up. The leaves on this pepper for example look a little bit yellow. So this is a wonderful time to come by and actually fertilize your plants with your liquid fertilizer. Now one other note that I'll mention is that whenever you're using a fertilizer whether it's a granular type or a liquid type like this you want to make sure that your actual pots are already watered. You don't want to put it onto a dry plant because then what's going to happen is your dry plant is immediately going to suck all of it up and it's just going to be too much for the plant to handle. So make sure that if you are using a liquid you pre-wet your soil and you water it beforehand. But liquid fertilizers are really wonderful for that quick release and for the flexibility of being able to apply it anywhere at any time that you want. One other thing I'll mention really quickly is that if you have a vertical system like a green stock the liquid fertilizer is great because you just mix up your fertilizer put it in the top reservoir and now you fertilize your entire green stock which is a lot of plants to fertilize in one go. So it's another great reason to have some liquids around especially if you have a green stock. Now this last tip is going to be how I actually fertilize my containers and also how I prepare my soil when I'm potting up seedlings things like that. It is actually pretty nice to have a little bit of fertility in there and one of my favorites to use is the Biotone Starter because it's kind of an all-purpose general blend. So let's go take a walk over to the seedling table and I'll talk about exactly how I do that. When it comes to maintaining fertility in containers and for when you're potting up or growing things in containers in general it is a great idea to actually use some fertilizer. In this case I have a 15 gallon root pouch here and this is just soil straight out of the bag so it has nothing really amended into it. Now they tend to have something like a 0.1, 0.2, 0.1 sort of fertilizer breakdown in soil mixes but if you're actually getting into growing something like say a pepper then you want to make sure that you give it enough fertility that it can actually grow all the way through the season because the soil that you're putting in is what the plant's going to get. When you plant in the ground it has like essentially unlimited access to the soil whereas in this container whatever you give it is what it's got. So we're going to add a scoop in and this is the Espoma Biotone Starter. The starter is great because in this case it is a 4, 3, 3 so it's a very balanced mix. It still has some calcium so it has everything your plant would sort of need. Now what you want to do is make sure that you mix it in. The thing that to think about when you're adding something like a organic slow release fertilizer and in this case I could actually add some more is that you want to keep it close to the top especially for a container. If I were to mix this into my whole soil what will happen is that some of that fertilizer will end up at the bottom of the pot and as I keep watering this pot with whatever plant I put in here how about this ricotta pepper basically all that fertilizer is just going to wash away. Now if I have it at the top of my bag like I did right here as I water it the fertilizer has somewhere to go it's not going to immediately just be at the bottom of the bag and that's what this plant wants. It wants access to the fertilizer throughout the whole season and not just at the end so we want to make sure we add it to the top and you know in two months as this pepper keeps growing I could come in scratch the surface add some more fertilizer just like we did with the tomatoes. Now I'll get this guy out of the way and we'll talk about how to prepare your soil for something like potting up seedlings. Now when you pot up a seedling it's now grown to the point that it has its true leaves and it needs a lot more energy. Now if you don't put anything that's fine you're just going to have to transplant this into its final location sooner because it's going to essentially run out of food. So what I really like to do is actually prepare my soil for potting up and again this is just regular potting mix but I've sieved it a little bit so that it has a little bit less of the chunky material makes it easier to pot up. I'm going to mix in a little bit of fertilizer not a lot because I just want to make sure it has something to begin with but what I'm going to focus on instead is actually the worm castings. Now worm castings aren't like really a fertilizer in the sense that they don't have a very high quantity of like nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus but they do have some and in this case the worm gold also has kelp meal and azomite mixed into it. What that does is it makes sure that all the trace elements that a plant would need are present in the soil. So I'm going to go ahead mix this up a bit. Usually I would use my power planter but let's just do this quick today. So got it all mixed up and then I could grab my container. So I'm going to use a four cell, fill in a little bit of soil here and then grab my edamame and pop it right in. So this is really great because now that I have some fertility added into that soil this plant can now sit in this four cell for much longer than it otherwise would be able to. So now that it's in I could actually leave this in here for probably two or three weeks maybe even more and get away with it. So that's really the great advantage of worm castings and fertilizer. They're slow release while still feeding your plant and really those are the three kind of primary ways that I fertilize and feed my garden and those are the majority of the products that I consistently use to get the results that I get. So thanks for watching guys. If you have any other questions go ahead and throw them in the comment and until then I'll see you next time.