Plant food

Hello again everyone

Just wondering what plant food everyone uses? Do you use chemical or organic methods? Willing to try different ways this year. Tried last year miracle Gro liquid plant food for containers and border/bedding plants with a variety of results.

 

I read an article by Lane-Fox, who has a column in the newspaper. He said that there were two types of treatment, soil conditioner and nutrition. He said that things like manure were excellant soil conditioners, ie putting humus in the soil that keeps it moist but well drained. But he also said (slightly surprisingly) that manure had almost no nutritional value. The nutrition, mainly nitrogen, comes from the urine which is usually well washed out by rain in well rotted manure.

His conclusion was that you used manure and compost for soil conditioning and that the best nutrition came from chemicals.

 

I use worm juice from my wormery for tubs and containers - it is fabulous stuff - the worms produce a surprising amount and it gets diluted about 10 - 1. Free too!

 

I think Lawrence Hills, who was one of the gurus of the organic movement would disagree with Lane-Fox. You don't need huge amounts of nutrients. Manure doesn't just act as a soil conditioner, it rots down to humus and humus provides more attachment points for the cations (nutrients) than anything else. On my last allotment I broke up virgin grassland and was only allowed to use farmyard manure by my wife.
As an experiment i grew Robinson's Mammoth onions and they were as huge as when i had grown them using artificial fertilisers.
When farmyard manure decomposes it can extract nutrients from the soil because they are used by the bacteria that are rotting it down. As the manure cools down and the bacteria die off they then release the nutrients they have obtained from eating the manure and that is ideal time to spread it.
according to Hills the NPK of FYM is
.64%,.23%,.32%
Household compost is .88%,.22%,.38%
These figures are what you would expect. Go much above them and either the plants don't absorb them and they wash through and pollute the groundwater or else the soil gets sick due to over concentration of the 'salts'

 

I suspect you are right geoff, a good dollop of manure never did anything but good. But for pots we don't have much alternative to chemical.

 

I use manure on all beds except roots and i also use comfrey and nettle juice for feed, I also use a bit of fish blood and bone.

 

I use f. b. and b.and i also use homemade comfrey and nettle juice too phewey. I occasionally resort to miracle gro, and from time to time resort to growmore, I mulch with the leftovers from gro bags, and i use alot of them (50+ per year). I mulch with farmyard manure, But get very cross with it. Yes it's great for conditioning the soil etc and so on, but when it's left in heap on other folks land, it gathers so many weed seeds. So i end up weeding the mulch. But can't complain on the free trailer loads i get. I also have my compost area. I have gathered 3 or 4 ton bags of leaves. but they have already rotted down to make just half a ton bag full. But everything helps to improve the soil and life of my plants, so i'm happy.