Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Blended Fertilizers
In garden centers, you can find blended fertilizers, and you can find recipes online for
how to blend together your own. Either way, these will usually include many of the follow-
ing ingredients: calcitic lime, dolomite lime, gypsum, rock phosphate, bone meal, guano,
greensand, kelp meal, fish meal, and seed meals such as soy meal.
When I first got into organic gardening, I was really excited about making my own or-
ganic blend. I think there is something very appealing to us as gardeners about this idea.
We get excited thinking about feeding this mix to our plants. Then I learned more and
gained more experience and realized none of my mentors did this, at least not with these in-
gredients.
The reason is that we don't know if our garden needs all of these things without a soil
test. It may very well be that we are pushing the nutrient ratios further apart by adding all
of this. I can see how adding a very small amount might stimulate microbial activity and
provide some energy to the garden, but it would be much better to apply just the things we
need. We can certainly take the rock dust and kelp meal and apply them without a soil test
as well as other biostimulants, but for the mineral fertilizers, we should use them only
when we know we need them.
