Wool Pellets are an ideal choice of fertilizer for sandy soils. Because it is a slow-release type fertilizer, it breaks down slowly over the season. This helps combat nutrient leaching often found in gardens with sandy soil due to rain or excess watering. In clay soils, wool pellets retain structure while breaking down slowly, improving aeration.
Because wool both retains moisture and improves aeration, Wool Pellets make an excellent, sustainable source of organic material to use in soil blocks and seed starts in place of peat moss. Peat moss takes thousands of years to generate, while sheep are shorn once or twice a year.
When used in potted plants or grow-bags, wool pellets make an great option for reusing potting soil. Potting soil can exhaust its nutrients over one or two seasons, making it a costly option to replace the potting soil every one or two years.
Try mixing wool pellets with older potting soil to renew it's vitality. You can add fresh compost worm castings to the potting mix to enrich it with microorganisms and help break the wool down faster.
Anti-slug Fortifications
As an added bonus, wool pellets make a great slug deterrent! The easy-to-arrange pellet format makes it fun to add fortifications around your plants and discourage slugs from feasting.
I had a 2lb bag of the wool pellets to try out, these are normally priced at $24. They are packaged in rather smart resealable bags, so the contents are kept safe and dry if not all used at once.
resealable bag
When opened there is a slight smell of sheep. I could hardly smell it, but my husband said it was fairly distinctive. The pellets were brown and firm but are soft on the hands, not hard edged as feed pellets would be.
I'm most interested in how the pellets might repel slugs, so I sprinkled some around my freshly planted perennials: two hosta and an echinacea - both normally slug magnets. The echinacea has no additional protection, the hostas both have a cut off plant pot collar around them, which I normally find gives some protection.
Hosta (left) has plant pot collar echinacea (right) just sheep pellets
I sprinkled the pellets on fairly thickly so that there was very little visible soil between them.
One thing I was worried about was whether my dogs would think the pellets were dog candy. I have had problems when using sheep fleece as mulch in the past with the dogs eating it and making themselves poorly. Both dogs showed an interest in the fresh pellets, but there is no sign of them wanting to eat them. I'm very happy about this, since it means the pellets won't need protecting from the dogs.
Della checking out the fresh pellets
The following day it rained, and the pellets swelled up rather more than I was expecting. They fully covered the soil around the echinacea, and rose up in the collar around the hosta. It looks like they will go much further than I was expecting. I love the way that you can see the colours in the individual fleeces - you can tell these are more interesting than the average sheep flock!
Wool pellets after soaking in rain for a day.
colour comparison of soaked and dry pellets
It is too early to say whether the pellets will protect the plants from slugs (which is my greatest interest) however they are clean and easy to apply. It looks like they will go much further than I thought they would - just a couple of handfuls are plenty to fully mulch a single plant with a four inch barrier. I love the authenticity of the fleece colours - it wasn't just boring white sheep that made up the flock that provided this wool! Hopefully my hosta will survive the growing season unmolested by slugs - and the pellets ought to gradually contribute to the fertility and ultimately growth of my plants.
Overall I like the pellets as a mulch, and am looking forwards to trying them as part of a soil mix in a potting compost, and as protection for my carrot seeds too.
I am really excited to see how these wool pellets help my plants grow this year! My pacific northwest soils are high in clay and low in nitrogen. We use peat moss whenever we can get our hands on it. But something that ís renewable and high in nitrogen is even better! I also have high hopes for their slug detterent effects. I didn't know that sheep's wool could be used in the garden. Again and Again farms has done a great job taking something that probably would have been waste and making it useful in gardens across the world.
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the front of a two pound bag of wool pellets. NPK ratio of 11-0-5
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Information about the other minerals and how to use the pellets
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to try out the sheep wool pellets from Again & Again Homestead. The pellets were uniform size and easy to handle out of the bag. There were no overpowering smells but you could tell it is a natural product.
I spread the pellets around the base of my tomatoes and eggplants where I was experiencing some non-targeted seed germination. The pellets spread easily and could be brushed into locations where I wanted them to be. I was fortunate enough to have a light rain happen the same day so I could inspect the pellets after. With the introduction of rain, the pellets started to 'unravel' and create a mulch on top of the soil. Once they were wetted, they are set in place.
I really like the product, but for my mulching purposes I would need a large quantity to sufficiently mulch my spaces. In the future, I would utilize this type of product for my container gardens specifically instead of my raised bed gardens which might be easier to mulch with other products.
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