Organic Fertilizers Explained- What Your Garden Needs for Soil Building, Fertilizing, and Amending.

Fish emulsions, compost, biochar, lime, bone meal, blood meal, worm castings, or manure. You walk into a garden center and it can feel like there's a hundred different things you're supposed to be adding to your soil. But here's the problem. They don't all do the same thing. Some of them feed your plants, some of them improve your soil, some provide just one nutrient for your soil, and some aren't really fertilizers at all. It can feel really confusing and overwhelming when you just want to know what you're supposed to add to your garden for your plants to thrive and your soil to thrive. So today we're going to break everything down into four categories. We're going to talk about our soil builders, our NPK sources, our micronutrient and single source items, and then we're going to talk about other amendments that change your soil instead of feeding your plants. Before we get into it, if you have any North Florida gardening buddies or any Florida gardening buddies in general, make sure you share this video with them. That's the only way that our channel grows and we get to talk with more gardeners just like you. Let's get into it. So let's talk about fertilizers. Fertilizers are something that you add to your soil with the purpose of feeding your plants. And there's different types of fertilizers you can use. So organic fertilizers are from like organic sources like plant, animal, like living sources where there's also synthetic fertilizers and those are made from chemicals. There's three major nutrients that plants need, NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. So when you look at the fertilizers in the garden center and you see those three numbers, those are the NPK values on there. It tells you the amount of each of those nutrients or the ratio of each of those nutrients that's in that product. In order to know which one you need, you have to know what NPK does for your garden. All of those nutrients do different things when it comes to your plants. So your first number, nitrogen, that supports like your green leafy growth. People will say if you're growing carrots and you have these big, beautiful greens, but there's no carrots on the bottom once they're ready to harvest, maybe your soil had too much nitrogen. Maybe you supported the leafy growth of that plant more than you supported the root growth of that plant. So you got lots on top and nothing underneath. Now let's talk about phosphorus. So that's the second number on that NPK value. So phosphorus is important for that root development. It's also important for flowering and it is incredibly important to support that fruit development on your plants. So when your plants are at the point where they are flowering and they are setting fruit and they are developing that fruit, that middle number, that phosphorus is important for their development. And lastly, we have that third value, that K or that potassium. Potassium is important for those strong stems and it helps to move water through your plant. It can also support the plant's overall health and its disease resistance. So just like our bodies, we need lots of different nutrients in order to be the best version of ourselves. Your plants are the same. But again, just like us, it doesn't end there. We don't just need protein, fat, and carbs for our bodies to work right and your plants don't just need NPK in order for them to grow and thrive. And that's where building a foundation really comes in. It's something that you add to your garden for the sole purpose of improving some sort of quality of your soil. That might mean improving soil structure, improving water retention, increasing organic material, improving nutrient retention, and this is where it can get a little bit confusing because some products can do both. So think about compost. Compost is a soil builder. Compost can improve the amount of organic material in your soil which can help the soil to retain moisture and it can also contribute a small amount of nutrients to your soil as well. And compost is actually the number one thing that I would recommend for adding to your garden to improve your soil, to improve your garden's ecosystem as a whole. It's something that I'm adding to my garden every single month now and before I do new plantings or if I turn an entire bed over, I'm adding a whole new inch of compost to the top of those garden beds to help my soil. The nutrients in compost can vary greatly. There's no standard amount that is in every single bag of compost because they're all made of different amounts of things. You can expect to have a little bit of nitrogen, a little bit of potassium, but really no phosphorus. So think about it as building the soil and adding just a little bit of nutrients along the way. Compost is different than animal manure. When we think animal manure, think manure that can come from things like cows, pigs, horses, chickens, rabbits. Manure can be a great source of fertility and organic matter to your garden, but it of course has to be composted before you were to add it. And while manure can be a good source of nutrients for your soil, it usually doesn't have all of the nutrients that your soil would need, similar to compost from organic matter. So worm castings are still in the soil amendment category. Worm castings is basically worm poop. It is worm poop. And you can buy worm castings from the store. You can make your own worm castings in like a bin that you put your kitchen scraps in. Or my favorite method, which I have not added to my garden yet, but I would love to, is in bed vermicomposting where you actually add little bits of compost or little bits of your kitchen scraps directly into your worm bin in your garden. Those worms move in, eat that vegetable scraps, make their worm castings, move back out, and you can use those worm castings to sprinkle around your garden. The purpose of this, again, is to provide just a little bit of nutrients, but to also build the organic matter in your soil. Another method that is in the soil building category is green manure. Think of this as plants that you are planting specifically to help to enrich your soil. So legumes are a really common one where if you clip that plant at the base, those roots stay in the soil, they break down and feed your soil with some nutrients, but you can also use the top greeny leaves of that plant to chop them up, either mix them into your soil or lay them directly on top, and as they break down, they will also continue to feed your soil. A lot of your marigolds or your cover crops, your cool season grasses fall into this category as well. A new one for me is biochar. Biochar is similar. It can help to improve the soil itself, but it's not necessarily a nutrient source for your soil. And biochar itself can be made of a lot of different things, but it's things that are charred or burned in the absence of oxygen, so it turns it into like a charcoal-based material. So soil builders are really important for our plants. We have to work on building a strong, healthy soil if we want to be successful in the long term of gardening, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the plants that you're growing now are going to have all the nutrients available that they may want. So that's where our NPKs come into play. So we're going to shift gears now and we're going to talk about what sources provide our NPK for our garden. So first up is nitrogen. As we said, nitrogen is mainly associated with that green leafy growth. If you're growing things like lettuce, kale, broccoli, those plants need to put on a lot of vegetative growth, so nitrogen is an essential nutrient for them. One source of nitrogen is fish emulsion. So fish emulsion is a liquid that is basically made from byproducts of a fish, all parts of a fish. Bones, skins, scales, you name it, in a liquid form. It is primarily a nitrogen boost, but it can provide small amounts of potassium and phosphorus for your soil. It's a liquid, so it doesn't hang around for long. It's more of a quick boost of nitrogen, but it's not something that's going to stay in your soil for a long time. Next up is blood meal, also in our nitrogen family here. Blood meal is really what it sounds like. So it is the dried blood of animals that is then dehydrated into a powder and that is applied directly to the soil. Now blood meal is an example of a slow release nitrogen option. So it can stay in your soil for about that one to four months, unlike that fish emulsion we just talked about, which is fairly quick because it is a liquid. There are other organic meals which are also in the nitrogen family that you can add. Things like alfalfa meal, soybean meal, even feather meal, which again are exactly what they sound like. Those products ground up into a product you can add directly to your soil. I do want to touch on legumes. We talked about them as a soil builder, which they're truly a green manure soil builder. They also release more nitrogen into your soil once they're able to break down. So you can put them in the green manure category, but you may also be able to think of them as a nitrogen boost for your soil. It's not something that you would add to your soil like an amendment or fertilizer. It's a plant that you can add the material back to. So I tend to think of that more in our green manure category. Moving on to some different phosphorus sources. So phosphorus is the one for our roots, our flowers, and for setting our fruits. Up first in our phosphorus category, we have rock phosphate, which is truly just rock that is ground up and to be a source of phosphate. If you're looking to add just phosphorus to your soil, you could use rock phosphate to add that mineral to your soil. Next up is bone meal. So we talked about blood meal for our nitrogen and we have bone meal for our phosphorus. Bone meal is the bones of animals that have been cooked and then grounded to a very fine powder. It does add a little bit of nitrogen to your soil. It's not like blood meal, which has a lot of nitrogen. This leans more on the phosphorus side of the nutrient panel. It is also a slow release fertilizer that you can add. It can take up to four months or even longer to be fully integrated into your soil and it can add some calcium to your soil as well. Now we're moving on to potassium. So that's your last category of your NPK values. So potassium again is really important for that stem growth, helping water to move through your plants and even helping that plant with some disease resistance. These sources are things that I'm a bit more unfamiliar with. Things like wood ash or green sand that primarily are adding potassium to your soil. Potentially a few other micronutrients depending on the source that you choose. So those are the most common sources of your NPK that you'll see on the shelves at the store. Now let's talk about our micronutrients. So these are more like the vitamins. If we take vitamins, these are like plant vitamins. So you can think more like your kelp or your seaweed products. Those are rich in the minerals that our plants would need to thrive. These are liquid products as well. So think about them more like a supplement for your garden. It's not the foundation for your garden. It's not going to hang around. But if you notice that a plant is struggling, it might be like a little supplement boost for them. Epsom salt can provide magnesium and sulfur to your garden. So these things are helpful when your garden or your plant is deficient in these sources. But it's not something that every plant in every garden needs to have a supplemental source of. Another source of micronutrients are shell-based products. So these can add things like calcium or a variety of different nutrients depending on what that specific product is made up of. They're all a little bit different. So you have to read the label to know what's in that product specifically to see if it matches with what you are wanting to add to your garden. So those are the most common vitamins for your soil. Those are the most common supplements that you can add if your garden is deficient in those specific things. The next category we're going to talk about is amendments to the soil. Things that are actually changing that soil. But they're not necessarily like a fertilizer. So lime, for example. Lime can adjust the soil's pH. It can also add a little bit of calcium. But lime isn't just something that you would add to all of your garden beds because it's not right for every single plant in those garden beds. But maybe it is right if you have a plant that you specifically need to change the pH of that soil in order for that plant to survive. So think soil-specific amendment, not all-purpose fertilizer. Gypsum is another product that can provide some calcium and sulfur for your soil, but you want to use it in specific cases. It's another monarch. Specific cases for specific plants, not just everywhere in all of your garden beds. I don't know about you, but I don't really have the desire to have all of these different products in my garage that I then need to worry about mixing the right ratios of in order to get the balanced NPK and micronutrients for my soil that I am looking for. But I'm also not interested in adding a bunch of synthetic fertilizers to my garden. But there's a great solution. You don't have to have all of these things. You can just buy a pre-mixed fertilizer that has all of these things already in it. There are tons of organic fertilizers that do this for you. They basically take all of the different things that we have talked to today and they combine them in order to give the balanced NPK ratios as well as some micronutrients in there as well for your garden soils without using synthetic chemicals. So that's the huge differentiator here. They've already boughten all of the ingredients and mixed them for you, so you can buy those instead of buying the synthetic fertilizers to help your soil grow and to help your plants thrive. Some common brands are like Espoma or Down to Earth or Dr. Earth. For most home gardeners, this is probably the best approach because you don't have to have all of these ingredients available to you to mix the right amounts to apply to your garden. Or at least in my stage of life right now, I would much rather buy something that I know is good for my garden and is going to combine those things for me and just that bad. So for most of us, the best approach is just to buy the one that is the most balanced NPK version and start there. And then as your growing season goes on, if you notice that your plant needs a specific nutrient or you're trying to correct a particular deficiency, then you can go and add the supplemental ingredients that you need that you now have the resource for to know exactly what product to add for those specific nutrients to your garden. Personally, my plan is every time that I plant a new plant or every time that I turn over for a new season, I'm adding some compost and worm castings to the top of that soil, planting that plant, topping up with some mulch. But now that I have some more information about what fertilizers are actually helpful to my soil to add versus harming my soil, I am going to start adding some organic fertilizer when I'm turning over those beds and potentially using a liquid organic fertilizer if I feel like those plants are specifically struggling or having a hard time. The biggest thing that I hope you take away today is we cannot have a healthy garden without the foundation. We have to be building the foundation of our soil in order to have a healthy garden. The second thing, you can choose the organic route or the synthetic route. Whatever way you choose, there are companies that have already packaged these ingredients for you with the NPK values that you are seeking. I choose to go the organic route, but I don't want to have 50 million bags in my garage and have to mix my own macro and micronutrients for my plants. I just want to have one bag that I can add to all of my plants. I'll link the one below that I'm going to be using for this next calendar year, so you can try it out if you'd like. If you are gardening down here in Florida or in North Florida specifically and you don't want to garden alone, I do have a month-by-month guide in the description below that tells you exactly what you can plant in your North Florida garden every single month out of the whole year and a ton of other really great resources. Let me know your preferred fertilizing method for your garden or how you build your soil below.