How To Fertilize Fruit Trees WITHOUT FERTILIZER! Amazing Results!!

What's growing on, gardeners? It's March 2nd here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina, and our trees and shrubs are beginning to wake up for spring. So it's time to feed them for the new growing season. To many of you, that means give them fertilizer, but you may be surprised to know that I don't give any of my established trees or shrubs any fertilizer at all, and I don't recommend you do either. So on today's video, I am going to show you how I feed my trees and shrubs without any fertilizer at all for incredible results every single time. If you're new to the channel, please subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, and check out my Amazon store and Spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom apparel and gear. So first things first, what is fertilizer? Well, fertilizer is concentrated nutrients that you add to your soil to feed your plants. In the case of an organic fertilizer like this, it is made out of poultry manure, seabird guano, fish bone meal, sulfate of potash, crab shell meal, shrimp shell, and soybean meal. So effectively, they are taking the byproducts of the meat, fish, and grain industry, and they are taking them, processing them into concentrated nutrient bomb pellets that you then sprinkle all over the ground to feed your plants. Now, an organic fertilizer like this, this is actually precursors to nutrients. It is not raw nutrients in its current form. It has to be wet by irrigation or rainfall and then consumed by the bacteria and the fungi in the soil. And once it is broken down, then those nutrients become bioavailable to your plants. Then you have fertilizers like your Miracle-Gro products or something like fish emulsion. These you mix in water, and they have already been processed either synthetically or naturally, so they're instantly bioavailable to your plants. When you mix Miracle-Gro in a watering can, it begins working right away. When you mix fish emulsion in a watering can, it begins working right away. So at the end of the day, regardless which fertilizer product you use, the whole reason why we use them is to feed our plants nutrients that the plants take out of the soil. Nevertheless, people ask me all the time, do we really need to give our plants fertilizer? I mean, nature doesn't fertilize plants, so why should we? Well, the answer to that is a hard maybe, and it really depends on your system and what you're growing. For example, annual vegetable gardens, at least in the sense that we currently understand them to be today, are completely unnatural, man-made systems. You are never going to be randomly walking around the forest and then stumble into a clearing and you have an annual vegetable garden growing where you have nice, neat rows of onions and kale and garlic and tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and all of the other fruits and vegetables that we think of when we hear the words annual vegetable garden. I mean, according to nature, vegetable gardens are aberrations. Not only will you never see nice, neat, organized rows of anything growing in nature, but everything that we grow in them are aberrations. They are products of generations of farmers saving the seeds with the biggest fruits and the plumpest bulbs and the most luscious leaves, things that natural selection would weed out on its own. None of these things should exist, but here we are growing them all in nice, neat, organized rows. Need more proof? Try to get an ardent vegetable garden to step away and take a two-week vacation in the middle of summer while their vegetable garden is growing. They can't do it because they are terrified that it will die without them keeping a constant watch over it. And that is how you know this is an unnatural system. It can barely survive a few weeks without our constant attention. And if I let this vegetable garden go and I moved away for two or three years and I came back, none of this would exist. Everything would be taken over by native weeds and maybe little pine cones that dropped everywhere. I'd have little trees germinating all over the place. And aside from maybe a few volunteers that self-seeded here and there, you'd never know that this was a vegetable garden. So for your vegetable gardens, you must give them fertilizer because they take more from the soil than they give back and they are the very definition of an unsustainable system. Another example of an unsustainable system is anything that we transplant. In nature, things are propagated either by seed or by plants literally air layering themselves and growing into a big mat. Things aren't taken out of pots and then stuck in the ground and left to grow on their own. In nature, either there's a host that is air layering itself and the smaller plants can feed off that host in a giant web, or only the strongest seeds survive. So if I were to say, transplant this bay laurel tree, it is going to take many years for the roots to actually grab hold and take over. So while every different species and climate may vary a little bit, I find that it usually takes about three to five years for a transplanted perennial to really grab hold and establish to the point where it can survive on its own and you can leave for years at a time and the plant can still exist without regular human intervention. Assuming that what you're planting is appropriate for your zone and climate and it can handle your wet spells and dry spells and overall weather. So during those establishment years, it is very important that we fertilize our perennials to give them easy access to nutrients because their roots simply lack the size and the ability to hunt out the nutrients that they need in the soil on their own Until they become a fully sustainable system that can exist without you, you should help them along by giving them some fertilizer. But somewhere around that five-year mark, something happens with our trees where they can become self-sustaining. They can exist without regular human intervention. For example, all of the fig trees behind me have been in ground for over six years. And I have no doubt that if I were to leave this house and never come back, 30 years later, I could revisit this property and without any human intervention at all, all of these trees would be alive and producing figs. When you reach the level of confidence that that is true about your trees, whether they are fruit trees, landscaping trees, bushes, shrubs, what have you, that is when you can stop giving them fertilizer and do this instead. I give my well-established self-sustaining perennials only two things, a good quality compost and an all-natural mulch. Now, in this case, I will be using a cow manure-based compost that I got from Lowe's and I will be using wheat straw. These straw bales have been sitting out in the rain and the snow and the sun for over two months to break down and make sure that we kill any of the wheat straw seeds in here so they do not germinate while I place it. But nevertheless, any natural mulch will do, whether it's a bark mulch, whether it's a shredded hardwood mulch, whether it's pine straw, wood chips, that is up to you. This is what I am choosing to use, but as long as it is all-natural and not a dyed mulch product or a stone or rubber mulch, you should be fine. And what we are trying to do here is emulate a natural forest. A forest is a sustainable system because all throughout the year, the different species of trees, they drop their leaves and bark and broken branches at all different rates and they drop on the floor. And over eons, all that fallen organic matter turns lousy, sandy, or heavy clay soil into a beautiful, dark, nutrient-rich loam. And it does this all throughout the year. So it gives itself a constant rain of nutrients down that break down over time. And that not only sustains all of the trees and bushes and shrubs and vines in the forest, but it supports the microbiome, the trillions of bacteria and fungi that make the soil alive and healthy. So why are we doing this if I said that these trees are already self-sufficient and I could leave for 30 years and come back and they'd still be alive and producing figs? Well, they don't have all of the support species around them that drop leaves and add organic matter to the soil at all times. They only do that and self-mulch themselves in the fall when they drop all their leaves in preparation for the winter. So while they would still survive and do probably okay without me supervising, they will do much better if I add the organic matter to the soil and I make that soil healthier by bringing in extra material from offsite. And I don't want these trees to just survive. I want them to thrive and produce more figs than I know what to do with. Here is what we will do. We will take the compost and spread it in an 18 to 24-inch diameter ring around the base of each tree. We want to make sure that the ring emanates away from the trunk because we are targeting the roots and the roots emanate away from the trunk. Don't dump your compost up against the trunk of the tree. We don't want to disturb the whole mulch layer either. We're going to dump the compost directly on top of the ground, minimizing the disturbance so we don't disrupt the microbiome. We are going to aim for a two-inch thick layer of compost around the base of each tree. Now at this moment, I only had two and a half bags of compost on hand and that was barely enough compost to feed these three trees that you see right here. So I have to go get more. Now using bagged compost can be quite expensive if you have a lot of trees that you have to feed. If you do, the best way to feed your trees is to call up a landscaping company and get a big truck delivery on your driveway of their compost. Or if you have a pickup truck, you can go to a landscape supply place and they can put a backhoe bucket full of compost in your pickup truck. You will pay a fraction of the cost in the long run versus buying bagged compost. And then we will take our natural mulch and we will place it around the base of each of our trees. We will aim for a mulch layer about three to four inches thick. It will go right on top of the compost that we just placed. And you may find it hard to believe, but that one $6.50 two-month-old bale of wheat straw was enough to very thickly mulch all three of these mature fig trees. This is why I love old wheat straw. What looks like a little bit goes a long way. It is one of the best and most affordable ways to mulch your trees. Now, here is how the system works. The compost, as the name implies, is already fully composted. So it will start feeding these trees immediately. The wheat straw, on the other hand, will take months to break down. And that wheat straw, as it breaks down, is going to feed the trees. So when the compost long exhausts its nutrients, the straw will start breaking down and feeding and picking up basically where the compost left off. The straw will become the new compost. Now, it's important to note that while the mulch layer is fresh, it will be doing wonderful things for our trees like blocking weed seed germination and also retaining moisture. But as it breaks down, that effect will wear off. So we have to constantly monitor the area and we have to add to the mulch layer as it breaks down. When we see bare spots, we have to add to it. Now, here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina, where we have a pretty long, warm, wet season, our mulch layers tend to break down pretty quickly. So I usually have to replace the layer two to three times a year, depending on how thick I made the mulch layer. If you live in a cooler or drier climate, you may not need to replace it as often. If you live in a warmer, wetter climate, you may need to replace it more often. So please keep that in mind. And here's the kicker. If you're growing any kind of trees or shrubs or bushes that you recently transplanted and they are not fully established yet, you will basically do the exact same thing, except you will add fertilizer. You will add one to two cups of an organic granular fertilizer in an 18 to 24 inch ring around the base. And then you will top that with the compost. Then you will top that with the mulch. So basically, if your trees are not fully established yet and you need to give them some fertilizer to boost, you follow the exact same procedure. You just put the fertilizer before you put the compost. Now, the last question I often get is, how many times a year do you have to do this? Well, for my deciduous trees and shrubs that wake up in the spring, I usually do this a month before they actually bud out. So roughly 30 days before my last frost date. Usually that is enough compost to keep them happy for the growing season, since they only spend seven months a year actually alive and the other four to five months or so, pretty dormant. So that's why I only give them compost once a year. But as I said, as for the mulch layer, you have to constantly maintain that mulch layer. So as it breaks down, you need to add more. And it usually takes two to three replacements of that mulch layer for all my trees throughout the year. Now, if you're growing an evergreen tree that does not go dormant, you will probably have to place that compost layer twice a year because they need nutrients all the time. They don't have a dormancy period. So you usually want to place your first compost layer somewhere between around 30 days before you see any kind of budding or flowering or fruiting on your evergreen trees. And then roughly six months after that. So basically you're doing the same exact thing with the mulch, regardless of what tree you're growing, but your deciduous trees, you give them compost before bud break. And for your evergreen trees, you're just going to give them compost twice. Once at the flush of buds and then another one six months later. And that right there is how I feed my plants without giving them any fertilizer. So everybody, I sure hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please make sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and please ring the notification bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these. For all of the products that I use in real life in my garden, they are all linked down below in my Amazon storefront link in the video description. So expand the video description, click on the Amazon storefront link, and you'll see everything I use in real life. And while you're down there, please check out my spread shop for custom merch if you want to support the channel. Thank you all so much for watching. And I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Dale is asking very nicely to try his first ever bite of fried pork chop. Now I don't fry food very often. In fact, I can't remember the last time I did, but this has been cooled off and it's just a little bit of crispy pork. So let's see how Dale does. Dale, be gentle. I would never give him any more than this because it's a little fatty. What do you think, buddy? Is that a little bit crispy and crunchy? That's everything, buddy. Well, I will just, I will be very, that's all you gotta get, buddy. You can't get any more than that. It's too oily even for humans. I definitely can't give it to you. So that's enough. Just wanted to give you your first ever taste, my sweet little boy.