Beginner Gardening: Natural Cheap Homemade Fertilizer, 0 by tapla

tapla wrote:
Plants make their own food through the process of photosynthesis. Through fertilizing, you provide the nutrients, the building blocks plants need to make their food, to grow, and to keep their systems orderly. When you fertilize with soluble fertilizers, you can be sure of exactly what nutrients you are supplying, and at what concentration. You can also rest easy in the fact that the nutrients are immediately available for uptake.

When you use soil amendments like various meals and other organic products, you usually have little idea what, exactly, you are supplying or when it will be available for uptake. Growing in containers is quite different from growing in the garden. Nutrients locked in hydrocarbon chains (like in the x-seed meal) are not available for uptake until microorganisms in the soil cleave the hydrocarbon chains and reduce the nutrients to elemental form. Since the populations of these soil organisms depend on a number of variables, their numbers are erratic in container culture, which also makes delivery/availability of nutrients erratic and unreliable in comparison with soluble forms of nutrients. This hasn't yet taken into consideration the impact the fine 'meals' and other soil amendments have on the physical properties of the soil - primarily aeration and drainage.

That said, I won't take time to explaining further or offer suggestions if an 'all organic' ideology limits your choices.

Al