Fertilizer mishap

Hi,

I put high-nitrogen fish fertilizer in my flower bed (x-large container) and japanese maple by mistake. I am worried that I won't get any flowers and that it will affect the shape/foliage of my maple. Should I worry? If so, what to do?

Advice appreciated.

Was it a liquid fertilizer or granular? If it was a liquid you can water the bed thoroughly today and it will dilute the fertilizer's strength and also most of it will leach away from the roots.

It was liquid. And it rained like crazy for a couple days after, which is when I realized my error. I was hoping that the rain would do it, but maybe I'll give it one last soak. Will it hurt the tree?

It may burn the newest, most tender roots but most plants recover from it and the new growth will be green as heck!

Was it just fish emulsion, or was it something that had the N boosted up with a bunch of synthetic stuff on top of the fish emulsion? Fish emulsion by itself doesn't have much nitrogen and the nitrogen that is there tends to release slower than synthetic ferts so I seriously doubt you'd have any problems.

It was all fish for my bamboo. Thanks for the input.

If it was just fish emulsion I don't think I've ever seen one of those with a nitrogen number over 2 or so, so I doubt you have anything to worry about. But since you said in your initial post that it was high nitrogen, I'd look at the N numbers on the package...if the pkg says it was something higher then there's other stuff in there besides the fish, and then flushing with water would still be helpful.

It's 511. It's the basic alaska fish fertilizer. I just assumed it was all fish. Ingredients only say it is derived from seagoing fish emulsion. I'll tell you one thing, my bamboo loves it. Now that I look more closely it says that it can be used on flowers etc but at a different rate. I guess I will drench again tomorrow and wait and see. I just don't want to have over-fertilized the tree in case it shoots out unruly branches.

thanks

5 is not high nitrogen, I wouldn't worry unless you used a ton more of it than you were supposed to.

Thanks again.

You know, when ltalent said "fish fertilizer" I though the same thing as you, ecrane. I've never seen a high nitrogen fish emulsion before. But then I figured, maybe they carry some hardcore ferts up there in New York City :)

I wasn't sure either at first, there are some "fake" organic fertilizers out there where they take something nice like fish emulsion and add a bunch of synthetic ferts to it to boost up the numbers but advertise like they were organic, so I wasn't sure if it was one of those or if it was plain old fish emulsion which I think you'd be hard pressed to over-fertilize with.

It's my mistake. Because it's for the bamboo only, I think of it as high N. I'm basically a compost gal -- the city gives it away free in great quantity -- so I'm not completely at home with commercial products hence the mix up not only in name but bottles. I've since marked it to distinguish from others.

Now that I've been tooling around the boards looking at fertilizer, I am wondering if this Bloom Booster is worth a try? My planters get morning sun. Sometimes I think the flowers could do with another hour. Would something like BB help them produce more flowers? And is it organic?

Do you have the exact name of the bloom booster product you're thinking of? Pretty much every fertilizer company out there makes one. The majority are not organic, although maybe there's an exception or two out there. Basically the bloom boosters have extra phosphorus which can help promote blooming (and you can find organic fertilizers that are a source for phosphorus if you want to stay organic, they won't be labeled as bloom boosters but it should have a similar effect). A lot of people use them for annuals like petunias, etc, but if your plants aren't getting enough sun to bloom well I'm not sure that bloom booster fertilizer is going to fix that. I'm really the wrong person to comment on this though, I grow a lot of plants that hate phosphorus and will die if you fertilize them with much of it, so I don't go near the bloom boosters!

Ecrane, you are confirming my original gardening impulse, which is to stay away from commercial products and stick with the simple compost. I think I'll sleep better. Thanks for all of your input.

Depending on what you grow and the condition of your soil, you might want to consider some fertilizer instead of just compost. But there are plenty of organic fertilizer options out there, there's no reason you would need to go to synthetics.

I like worm poop :) But seriously, I support Terracycle because they have some great products made from worm poop and they even come in old soda bottles (they're better than recycled, they're reused). http://www.terracycle.net/main_plant_food.htm

Well let me ask you. I have container beds with a lot of different plants. The acid lovers are kept separately. Otherwise they are pretty diverse aside from shade tolerant. So how do I know if they are going to hate potassium or what they like other than a balanced product?

It's phosphorus that some of mine hate. I grow a lot of things in the Proteaceae family so it's a fairly unique situation, things in that particular family hate phosphorus and many will die if they get too much of it. And I also collect hibiscus, which unlike most other flowering plants will actually not flower as well if you give them the bloom boosters. But I was mainly using that as an example of why I'm not the best person to provide advice on bloom booster fertilizers, I doubt if anything in your garden is going to have trouble with phosphorus. They're not organic though, so if you're trying to stay organic then they're probably not the right way to go. If you want one fertilizer that you can use for everything, you can't really go wrong with a nice balanced fertilizer, that's sure a lot easier than trying to come up with a different perfect fertilizer for every single plant!