Know Your Ingredients

Some of the recipes in this chapter include fertilizer products that you'll need to buy at a garden center or through a mail-order supply company. If you're new to using organic fertilizers, you may not know the names of some of these products. Here's a rundown of some products you'll use:

Blood meal: dried blood produced as a by-product of the meat industry; con tains about 13 percent nitrogen
Colloidal phosphate: clay washed from rock phosphate when the rock phos phate is mined; good source of phos phorus
Cottonseed meal: a waste product left after cottonseed oil is pressed out of cot tonseed; may contain chemical residues
Fish emulsion: a liquid by-product of the animal feed industry, made from fish; good source of nitrogen
Creensand: mined mineral deposits; good source of potassium and other minerals
Guano: aged, dried bird or bat droppings; high in nitrogen and phosphate
harvests of vegetables and fruit will require more frequent fertilizer applications, particu larly before and immediately after flowering.

Pick Your Mix
You'll find both dry and liquid fertilizer formulas in this chapter. Dry fertilizers, such as long-lasting granular or powdered mixes, are great for sidedressing actively growing plants. These power-packed organic fertil izers not only supply nutrients, but also im prove the texture and moisture retention of the soil by feeding a vast army of beneficial microbes (as many as 900 billion in 1 pound of soil). And these fertilizers will keep on working for weeks, even months.

In most cases, you can just spread dry fertilizer on the soil around individual plants and lightly scratch them into the soil. If your soil is low on any of the major nutrients (nitrogen is especially soluble, so it leaches out quickly from the soil), these dry fertilizers may be the best way to pro vide them.

The liquid fertilizer formulas we've col lected take the form of fast-acting teas and mixtures for foliar feeding (spraying the leaves of a plant) and soil drenches. While it's no substitute for a balanced soil, foliar feeding can be the best way to supplement your plants' diets. Like the vitamin and mineral supplements we humans take to combat high stress levels or to make up for poor eating habits, foliar feedings don't replace good soil fertilizers, they merely supplement them. If major nutrients or trace minerals are missing from the soil, these liquid fertilizers, sprayed directly on the leaves, will provide them fast! Plants will immediately absorb the micronu-trients from liquid fertilizers like manure tea, compost tea, and seaweed solutions. Since plants can't store excess nutrients in their leaves and draw on them later, you'll have to repeat foliar feedings at regular intervals.

Bucket beat bags
It's cheaper to buy fertilizer ingredients in bulk and split the costs and the resulting mix with a gardening friend or neighbor. But splitting a batch isn't always possible, and it's a good idea to be prepared in case there are leftovers.

You'll need containers, of course, but labels are just as important. Always label fertilizer containers before you fill them so there's no chance of forgetting a label or confusing the contents with another garden product.

Store homemade fertilizer in 5-gallon plastic buckets with lids. That way, mois ture (and pests) can't get into the mix and spoil it. You can get buckets for free—or for • a small fee—from grocery stores and restaurants. Attach your labels, or use a permanent marking pen to write the date and ingredients on each bucket.