Many of us use degraded
land and have to build up fertility to produce the bumper crops we so want to show off to our friends. We all have a way of doing this, some of us, quite weird -yet awesome, some maybe just weird, but I think we could all benefit from sharing our way of ensuring our plants get healthy. After all, healthy plants make healthy people.
For me, I use a little nutrient deficiency symptoms cheat sheet (googled and printed), plus for NPK + pH I use one of those little chemistry sets from time to time. To fertilize, I like blood and bone meal to ensure all herbivores know there's some voracious predators in this garden and they must steer clear. But, I also try to grow my own
compost which is comprised of just about anything carbon-based the dog wouldn't eat. HOWEVER, because the poor soils here are sooo abused, that is not nearly
enough. Many water-soluble nutrients are leached out and in not nearly high enough presences in the fertilizers in the store, which focus on NPK, not CA, Mg, Mn, Cu, Zn, .... So, I use Epsom salt and ag. lime, for Magnesium, tums,
milk, cement lime, and calcium pills for calcium, multivitamin for Mn and whatever other micros unlisted. I pour old soup broth and hard-boild egg
water and anything else too liquid for the compost all around, ensuring I have some food-safety separation when it comes to things that could make me ill. I've soaked banana peels and burnt
wood for the
ash (okay, the hot dogs weren't bad either) to
beef up potassium. The results definitely show in the garden. It looks SOOOO much better than last year. My next "attack" will be smashing lava rocks and sprinkling that around, along with emptying a bag of rough sand, crushed gravel, or the like across the ground since I think I have seen about 5 rocks total in the garden (0.1 acres) that I didn't place there myself, so I figure we could probably just use some fresh deposition since anything that was on the old deposition (or most everything) has been removed. For indoors, I use only liquids (to prevent gnat growth), out doors is a free-for-all.
What are your fertilizer strategies?