Lots of people take their left over tea and pour it over the soil of houseplants thinking that it does some good. Tea obviously contains chemicals and they might be good for plants. What about the milk, and sugar? Does it help plants grow?
Are any of the chemicals harmful to plants? Will the mixture cause bacteria or mold to grow in the soil? Sit back, have a cuppa and lets explore this habit of adding tea to houseplants.
Everybody tells you that plants need to be fed. Thousands of gardening books and blogs confirm the fact. Fertilizer companies certainly continue to make you feel as if you are letting your plants down if you don’t fertilize. And most nurseries try to push their products at checkout.
I have good news for you. In most garden situations, you do NOT need to fertilize.
The idea that ornamental gardens need fertilizer is a big myth.
Social media is convinced that gelatin powder is a great fertilizer for plants. It is easy to use, organic, and has a high level of nitrogen. Seems perfect for houseplants and the garden.
Is this just another myth, or is there something to this advice?
Three years ago I started a study to see if eggshells decompose in my soil. Details of the study can be found here: Eggshells – Decomposition Study. It is now year three of a six year study and time to have a look at the buried eggshell.
Is Soil Fertility Decreasing? Are agricultural soils less nutritious today than they were 50 years ago? I think most people believe these statements to be true. The idea has certainly been promoted a lot in the last 20 years. The claim is that our food is less nutritious than it used to be, and the main reason is that soils are being depleted of nutrients.
There is also a big movement to remineralize our poor soils. Hopefully, adding things like rock dust will bring it back to historical levels. The organic movement is also very big on solving these kinds of soil issues. Before we can understand the benefits of such actions, it is important to determine how big of a problem we really have. How depleted are our soils? Which nutrients are missing?
Chelates are a hot new additive for soils that claim to make plants grow better and solve the problem of chlorosis. Chelated fertilizer use is also on the rise and even products that aren’t true chelates are reported to have chelating properties.
What is chelation (key-LAY-shun) and should you be adding chelates to soil? Are chelating properties good for plants?
Compost tea is reported to be great for growing plants, and some companies even call it a compost tea fertilizer. What is the NPK value of this magic potion?
I started this post about a year ago, and at that time, there were many products on the market, but I could not find one that provided the compost tea NPK value. I checked again today and was surprised that the number of compost tea products available is down significantly. Maybe it was too expensive to ship all that water around the country? Maybe it did not work, and people stopped buying the product?
Interestingly, the number of commercial DIY kits for making your tea is up significantly. When you click on Google Images for ‘bottles of tea,’ you are taken to pages selling kits. Even with kits, the same question needs to be asked. What is the NPK value of the tea these kits produce? Very few of the manufacturers I looked at provided such information, but many did say their compost ingredients were the best. Easy to say if you don’t give any data.
Even if you are not interested in compost tea, the following discussion will show you how companies are misleading consumers.
People speculate that blossom end rot in tomatoes and peppers is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil. Many now suggest that dropping a TUMS (common brand of antacid) into the soil below each tomato or pepper will prevent this problem.
Will TUMS cure blossom end rot (BER)?
This is a very good example of a myth that can be debunked very easily, knowing nothing about BER.
Fertilizing gardens is a popular topic and every gardening book and website will give you advice. There are thousands of products on the market claiming they are the best ones for your garden. The problem is that almost none of this information is correct. Most gardeners are wasting time and money on fertilizer they don’t need. Even worse is the fact that they are wasting a valuable natural resource and polluting the environment.
If you garden, please take the time to understand fertilizers. I know this is not a glamorous topic, but it is very important to the garden and the environment.
I just replied to a comment in my Fish Fertilizer Post which said, “It’s surprising the article makes no mention of the full spectrum of minerals present in sea food, and therefore the fertilizer. Sea water is known to have an astounding 82 elements (don’t have the link, please Google it) The only thing that prevents us from using sea water as fertilizer is the high sodium content. Fish do the wonderful job of filtering out that excess sodium and leaving you with extremely mineral rich organic matter ! “.
A couple of weeks ago at the Guelph Organic Conference, one of the salespeople selling an Australian sea salt extract, claimed that his product contained 99 nutrients that plants need.
I found the following claim on a company website; “Azomite – Organic Trace Mineral Powder – 67 Essential Minerals for You and Your Garden”. Azomite is a brand name product made from “special” rock dust.
Why does fertilizer only show three nutrient numbers, NPK, when plants need either 67, 82 or 99 nutrients? Inquisitive gardeners want to know.
The idea that salts kill plants and microbes seems very prevalent, especially among organic growers. The topic is poorly understood and leads to a number of statements that are either false or mostly false.
“Fertilizer kills plants because it is a salt”
Farmer fields are devoid of microbes because of the salt in fertilizer”
“The NPK in manufactured fertilizer is made soluble by chemically attaching the NPK to salts”
“They [fertilizers] also make it easier for the chemicals to run off into waterways”
“Organic sources contain fewer salts”
“Organic sources are slow release”
“Fertilizers are designed to be highly soluble”
It’s time for a chemistry lesson to better understand salts, ions and the difference between synthetic and organic fertilizer.
Compost tea is all the rage but does it really work? Research studies so far have produced mixed results. The science to support the use of aerated tea on crop plants, lawns, shrubs, or trees is very weak, at best.
There seems to be a lot of work done in this area but much of it is not published in peer reviewed journals and most of it has been done in labs and greenhouses, not in the field. Until the work is repeated in the field we can’t conclude it works in gardens.
The other problem is that controls have been poorly selected. For example, in one study (ref 3) they compared ACT compost tea to water, using lettuce that had been under-fertilized. Guess what, compost tea improved growth. This only proves that adding nutrients, when they are deficient, will improve growth. The study never compared compost tea to adding nutrients in other ways.
In this post I will review one study that compared the use of compost to compost tea, in field conditions.
