If you read a number of web sites, especially organic gardening ones, you quickly realize that there are two basic kinds of fertilizer. There is the ‘synthetic fertilizer’ which you buy in bags. This fertilizer is clearly BAD! Then there is the good stuff; organic fertilizer.
What is the real difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer? Is there a difference? The answer may surprise you.
In may last couple of posts on manure tea and compost tea I explained why there is little or no reason to brew the tea. I am sure that I have not convinced all of you since the web is full of stories promoting manure tea as a good thing for your plants. If you want to brew some tea it probably will not harm you or your plants, but it could; see the bottom section of Compost Tea.
If you must brew some tea, please do it intelligently. Don’t use commercial products!
Brewing manure tea is a sin. Not a religious sin, but an organic gardening sin.
You are probably sitting there thinking – is this guy crazy? Compost is organic and so the brewed tea from compost or manure must also be organic. Read on and I just might convince you that compost tea is NOT very organic!
Which fertilizer should you be adding to soil? How much fertilizer should you add? Why is my plant not growing well? These are all very common questions and a very common answer to them is; do some soil testing!
That may be the right answer, but there is much more to the story. Let’s have a look.
Compost Tea has become a very popular topic. The following is a quote from Fine Gardening (ref 2):
Gardeners all know compost is terrific stuff. But there’s something even better than plain old compost, and that’s compost tea. As the name implies, compost tea is made by steeping compost in water. It’s used as either a foliar spray or a soil drench, depending on where your plant has problems.
Why go to the extra trouble of brewing, straining, and spraying a tea rather than just working compost into the soil? There are several reasons. First, compost tea makes the benefits of compost go farther. What’s more, when sprayed on the leaves, compost tea helps suppress foliar diseases, increases the amount of nutrients available to the plant, and speeds the breakdown of toxins. Using compost tea has even been shown to increase the nutritional quality and improve the flavor of vegetables. If you’ve been applying compost to your soil only in the traditional way, you’re missing out on a whole host of benefits.
Let’s look at the facts.
Deep root fertilization is a recommended procedure by many arborists. Does it work? Is it the best way to fertilize trees? Do trees need to be fertilized?
You see the word organic used everywhere these days so you would think that the word has a simple definition. Not so.
The word is used by different groups of people to mean different things.
