August 20th

We’ve reached the point of the summer when in my San Diego area garden, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant have kicked into high gear. Squash and zucchinis are still producing, but the cukes have pooped out. My cucumbers are often short lived, which always makes me wonder whether I’ve used enough fertilizer, or the right fertilizer.

I put the question to my seed testing colleagues: What do you do about summer fertilizing?

Their answers covered the entire range. Some folks, like Bill Nunes in California’s Central Valley, do a thorough job of preparing the soil, adding compost and nutrients, and leave it at that. Others rely on the nutrient input from cover crops they grow in between producing crops. Yet another group applies generous helpings of organic-based micro and macro nutrient fertilizers, and some of our numbers use compost tea.

Here are some details:

Like me, Stephanie Van Parys (who gardens in Georgia) fertilizes with whatever she has on hand. “My friend has goats,” she writes, “so three or more months before planting, I put down 4-6 inches of goat manure on the bed and cover with straw. When planting, I drop a trowel full of compost into the hole and set the plant on top of it. The goat manure beds grow amazing tomatoes!” An inch of good compost tops Stephanie’s soil and she’s done with fertilizing for the season.
I tend to rely more on worm compost that comes from our kitchen scraps. A handful in the bottom of a planting hole, combined with a scoop of Dr. Earth Tomato, Vegetable, And Herb Food, keeps most plants (other than cucumbers) going strong all season.

Stephanie and I are in good company. Pam Ruch, the seed testers’ fearless leader in Emmaus, PA rarely fertilizes. Instead, she keeps beds actively growing, either with crops or cover crops, which, she finds makes her plants “grow so lustily” that it rarely occurs to her to fertilize.

In Pam’s home garden, (can you imagine overseeing a huge garden all day, then going home to garden again?), she prepares the beds with compost. This year, she is also testing a fertilizer called “Cockadoodle DOO.” With a name like that, I just had to call the Pure Barnyard, the company that makes Cockadoodle DOO for details.  This fertilizer, the company’s customer service person told me, is an organic, pasteurized chicken manure that looks like oversized coffee granules. The manure is composted, dehydrated, pelletized, heated to kill pathogens and weed seeds, and finally granulated. I can’t wait to hear how it works!

Don Boekelheide grows veggies in North Carolina’s red clay soil. His big challenges are his soil’s tilth (its heavy texture), slight acidity (pH 5.5), and low phosphate content (the “P” in NPK). Unfortunately, Don’s urban garden is far from livestock which makes, in his words, “poop hard to transport.” Instead, he relies on lots of compost mixed into garden beds before planting and added afterwards as mulch.
Don is our resident nitrogen expert, which was the subject of his thesis. He tells us that as important as it is to prepare planting beds, it is also important to supply nitrogen to plants during development.
He grows philosophical as he explains what he is trying to accomplish in his garden – other than growing vegetables:

“If you look at highly productive ecosystems (estuaries, for instance), you see how they rely on large natural inputs of mineral nutrients. So, I'm trying to balance a scientific view strongly influenced by ecology with a sense of wonder and acceptance. Anyway, I make all these charts and spreadsheets tracing nutrient amounts, uptake and probable outputs. I try to account both for what goes in and what comes out, and I'm now trying to go beyond the crop to consider the whole soil/garden system ecologically (we're not just fertilizing the tomatoes, we're fertilizing ‘everything’)...Beats Sudoku, I guess...”

From a practical standpoint, Don says, some crops, like corn, are especially “nitrogen hungry.” He plants seed into nitrogen-enriched soil. Then, as the stalks stretch skyward, he sidedresses them with high nitrogen sources (he favors soy meal and fish meal which I remember from my days in North Carolina is very easy to come by). He uses other organic materials with macro and micro nutrients in the form of compost, bone meal, feather meal, seed meal and a product called Espoma Plant-tone. When the tassels appear (that’s the silk at the top of each ear of corn), Don feeds with yet more nitrogen.

Leslie Doyle in Las Vegas favors home-made fertilizer mixes for her desert soils. Her favorite recipe is 4 cups cottonseed meal to 1/2 cup of bone meal and 1/4 cup of kelp meal. “We have enough potassium in our desert soil that I really shouldn't need the kelp,” she says, “but I use it because of all its trace elements/micronutrients. And, I have read reports that kelp makes an antibiotic in soil that can eliminate some pathogens. Which pathogens? I don't know. I mix a handful of this into the soil for each plant where I plant.”
Does kelp really act like an antibiotic? If you have reliable research data on this point, please send it to us at seedtester@plantsoup.com.

This year, Leslie is testing a new product made from the unused parts of chickens. “It looks like it might be dried and ground up parts; bones, feet, heads, sinew, feathers, etc. And this is kind of peculiar,” she continues, “the NPK is 6-6-6, but the packages are going to be printed with NPK 6-6-5 and some with 6-5-6 because they think people won't buy it at 6-6-6 . . . the sign of the DEVIL. Spooky to some people, huh? I never would have made the connection.”

Once her plants start filling garden beds, adding fertilizer to the soil becomes more difficult, Leslie says, so she turns to foliar sprays. “Foliar feeding with kelp works great,” she writes, “I also think it is necessary in our harsh climate.” Once or twice during the growing season, Leslie sprays with tea from worm compost and castings. In May/June, she foliar feeds with liquid kelp and repeats the process around the end of July “to get plants through the rest of the heat,” and then again in late September.

Speaking of foliar sprays, Coloradoan Ann Caffey’s years of experience and experimenting with fertilizers has made her a believer in biodynamic gardening conceived of and promoted by Rudolf Steiner back in 1924. Ann uses SoilSoup compost tea applied as a foliar spray three to four through the growing season.  Ann admits to having no particular schedule for spraying, but instead watches for when her plants “look like they need it” which is to say when they look “stressed” when she sees evidence of hungry critters feeding on the leaves or stems. Ann says that compost tea “seems to ‘relax’ my plants and they quit sending out those nasty vibes that attract insects.” Hmmm.... 

Have any questions or comments for the seed testers? Send them to SeedTester@PlantSoup.com.

Wishing you a healthy green garden!

Nan Sterman

Comments

[TopVeg]

This is a useful article

Thank you

[Tim Lester]

You will get great results if you compost the manure. More information on composting at www.nuganics.com.au .
Kind Regards
Tim Lester
http://www.nuganics.com.au