The straight pooh on fertilizer

In The Garden

Keith Ramsey: How are we doing today? We were going to talk about fertilizer for your yard, lawn, and garden today. There are always lots of questions that surround fertilizer and what to use and when to use it. It's pretty much two broad groups of fertilizer, organic fertilizer and chemical fertilizer, and customers are always with the organic movement:

[00:01:00] they're always worried about using chemical fertilizer, so I thought I'd talk about that and why it's important sometimes to use chemical fertilizer. It's chemical chemically produced, but it's just chemically produced to increase the amount of whatever element they're trying to try and to increase it.

[00:01:16] So to get nitrogen high enough to grow tomatoes, you really need some chemical fertilizer, in my opinion. Its organic fertilizers are a good thing for building soil. It's more like taking a multivitamin chemical fertilizer, like a perfect punch. It's gonna; it's gonna really put that plan into a growth model.

[00:01:33]Joe Woolworth: To enrich it with nitrogen is something that occurs in nature. I think most people would probably be afraid that they'd put something weird in it. We're all thinking, what will we eat? I don't want to put monologues 473 in my body.

[00:01:45] Keith Ramsey: It is. So it's, it's chemically produced. It's, they're extracting nitrogen out of a natural source and just boosting the

[00:01:52] Joe Woolworth: they're not trying to make it taste good. Exactly. What all this weird stuff and food. Exactly.

[00:01:56] Keith Ramsey: It's not you're

[00:01:57] Joe Woolworth: feeding your fertilizer.

[00:01:58] Keith Ramsey: Stop that immediately.

[00:01:59] No, there's no 21, a red dye. Nitrogen is the key element in fertilizer for plant growth. There are pretty much nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but those are the main elements. The nitrogen gives you plant growth and gives you that dark green color. If you, when your plant's yellowing generally all over the plant, usually that's a sign that it lacks in nitrogen.

[00:02:20] Sometimes, that can be a sign that the nitrogen can be there and the pH is off. So getting the pH right. So that the plant can actually accept the fertilizer that's there is important. Potassium's there for plant quality. It helps and aids in flowering and stem growth.

[00:02:36] It's all derived from rock phosphate. And if you apply rock phosphate to the soil as an organic phosphate, it really requires probably a year or two for the phosphate to break down. So adding a chemical phosphate is important.

[00:02:50] If you want to affect the plant, this year or immediately, phosphate is linked to storing energy, the process of photosynthesis. So general plant and health and quality flowering and rooting. Potassium, on the other hand, is it's really there for plant vigor and strength.

[00:03:05] Many times, root crops like potatoes or carrots or that kind of thing will need extra potassium to build that strong tube or root that you're going to eat. And that's an easy thing to get it, organically. It also helps the potassium also helps the plant resist disease.

[00:03:21] And then, there are all kinds of minors and so sometimes doing a soil test if you've got a plant or if you're particularly if you're growing crops of plants say you've got multiple blueberries or a blueberry farm.

[00:03:33] Soil testing is important because if the plant needs magnesium or manganese or iron, sulfur, copper, zinc, boron, those are the main minor elements a plant will use. If they need those and there's deficiency there, you can't just broadly add those to the soil.

[00:03:51], They're in many general-purpose fertilizers and are available in a lot of chemical or organic fertilizers. Still, if you're really deficient in one or two of those, it'll make a difference. Iron's a classic example of a soil lacking an iron, And you're adding nitrogen to the soil because of the plant's yellow.

[00:04:09] Sometimes, it just needs a handful of iron to make it make that difference. And in the olden days, people would add old nails or leftover steel to the soil around the tree. And then the iron would just, as it as the iron rusted it would become available to the plant, and they would leach down into the soil.

[00:04:25], You hear old-time gardeners say, throw a handful of nails in the bottom of the hole when you're planting a tree, and that would keep the tree really dark green and actively growing.

[00:04:35] Joe Woolworth: Wow. So that's a lot of variables. There are three main components. There are five or six other sub-main components.

[00:04:40] And it depends on where your soil is, what plans you're growing. So when you go into a place like a garden supply company, how many choices for fertilizer?

[00:04:49] Keith Ramsey: So there's a lot of different choices. I usually tell people not to get too bogged down in the details, even though we started in the details.

[00:04:56]Adding fertilizers to the landscape or to the lawn at the right time of the year in some form or fashion, the plants utilize the fertilizer and then every few years doing a soil test. Have a baseline. Do you know, especially if you're buying a new house or starting a new garden, getting a soil test upfront and getting a baseline so that you can head in the right direction is a good idea?

[00:05:16] And then just updating that every three to five years kind of thing.

[00:05:21]Joe Woolworth: You mentioned the comparison of like multivitamins to types of fertilizer, are there a couple that always works really well for baseline?

[00:05:30] Keith Ramsey: You go with these lawn fertilizers, for instance.

[00:05:31]I think it's essential. I follow up the guidelines from a lawn program in Virginia from the Virginia extension service, but. It's the sod program. And so you fertilized September, October, and December. The two main differences in fertilizers from in the, in that you're going to put down in the fall are a starter fertilizer, which tends to be high in phosphorus.

[00:05:54] So you want it for root growth. And so you're trying to establish good, strong roots, and you don't want to push that plant really hard with nitrogen. So it's lower in nitrogen higher and phosphorus and potassium. So that's what you start with within September, and then as the grass plant matures and starts to root in.

[00:06:09] Then you move to something higher in nitrogen because you want to push that plant to have top growth so that it also needs to grow more roots. And it's more established by the summertime,

[00:06:19]the difference between organic fertilizer and chemical fertilizer, so if you wanted an organic lawn, I recommend doing it. 90% of the time. Going back to chemical fertilizer, because if you do an organic fertilizer in the lawns, not getting enough green and it's not growing enough roots, it doesn't have everything it needs.

[00:06:39] The lawn will be lacking. And then it's, you're talking about an environmental issue. So if you put a lot of chemical fertilizer out and it's not a slow-release fertilizer, it can leech, and you lose that fertilizer. And it's not necessarily great for the environment, but if you use a.

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