Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
There are always lots of questions surrounding fertilizer: What to use? When to use it? What kind of fertilizer: organic or chemical fertilizer. Today we discuss it all.
Show Notes
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.
[00:01:59] 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?
[00:05:21]Joe Woolworth: You mentioned the comparison of like multivitamins to types of fertilizer, are there a couple that always works really well for baseline?
[00:05:31]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.
[00:06:52] Chemical fertilizer that slow release. You're doing a good thing for the environment. You're establishing a thick green lawn that filters the water. The nitrogen is released as the lawn needs it. So it's not necessarily an issue. How do you determine
[00:07:08] Keith Ramsey: Typically, the fertilizer bag will tell you a cheaper bag of fertilizer, like 10, 10, 10. People will come in and say, don't you have 10, 10, 10? We don't really carry it anymore because it's not that specific for your need, and it's all quick release.
[00:07:22] So if you drop 10, 10, 10 on your lawn, and we have, the kind of month we had, we've had recently where it's just lots and lots of rain. Most of that fertilizer's going to leach out before the lawn actually even gets to take advantage of it. So most higher grade, a little bit more expensive.
[00:07:38] Fertilizers are gonna are going to give you results that are probably 10 times. What? 10-10-10. 10-10-10 in the perfect environment. Is awesome. If you'd get moderate rain and it doesn't, you don't put too much of it on, so it doesn't burn. That's the other thing about slow-release fertilizers versus fast-release fertilizers is you've got the opportunity to burn a plant or burn the roots.
[00:08:00]difference, when you're using organic fertilizers, there's all kinds of sources for organic fertilizers feather meal, from a poultry plant. Which is a by-product, but it's a good nitrogen source manure bone meal, alfalfa green sand self-aid, and magnesium.
[00:08:16] All of those are great sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. And a lot of the organic fertilizers that we sell now Biotone is one that we, every job, every landscape job we use, use Biotone in the hole when we plant the plants. And the reason is organic fertilizers more, again, more like a multivitamin you're dropping in the hole.
[00:08:36] There's a little bit of it that's readily available, but with an analysis like four, three, three, a half a percent maybe is available when you put it in the hall. So you're not giving that much nitrogen to grow. You're giving it nitrogen that the microorganisms will have to break down, and it'll be available over the next six months or for till the end of time, then over the next six months in a reasonable quantity then, slightly available after that.
[00:09:04]But that Biotone has all kinds of bacillus 9 million bacilli, per application. So their colony forming units of that'll actually break down. They aid the plant in like fighting off diseases, or it's similar to what we take for, your stomach for digestion it coats the roots it AIDS in disease prevention and insect prevention. The other component is mycorrhizal fungi, which Biotone has in it that bridges the gap between the roots and the soil. It's a symbiotic relationship as the mycorrhizas is a white fungus in the forest, leaves, and trees. As the fungi grow through the soil, the roots follow it. It allows them to take up nutrients better, take up water better than the fresh new fibrous roots of a plant will follow.
[00:09:53] fungi. And it's just a perfect symbiotic relationship. So you'll end up all the university studies show you plant roots, where they've been washed off the soil. You'll have 10 times the amount of roots, and especially fibers roots, which is what's going to take up fertilizer and take up water in a plant that's been planted with mycorrhizal fungi or that was grown in the woods versus one that was grown in red clay, or, more of a sterile environment.
[00:10:17] Joe Woolworth: We've been talking a lot about the chemical makeup of fertilizers. I was always under the impression that fertilizer was just like feces. It was just a waste.
[00:10:25] Keith Ramsey: Yeah. Organic fertilizer is taking bonemeal, for instance, and extracting the phosphate out of bone meal or out of rock phosphate.
[00:10:35] Joe Woolworth: When people ask for organic fertilizer, they're just asking for straight pooh?
[00:10:37] Keith Ramsey: they're asking for bonemeal like if they wanted to ask, it would be bonemeal, or it'd be manure. It would be. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Then, it's organic fertilizers where you get the smell too so that a chemical fertilizer will have a little bit of an odor to it; organic fertilizer always makes me laugh when a kid walks in adults, nose, noses start to fade as they age, they don't pick up on It smells like most people. Still, a kid will walk into a garden center and our garden essential area.
[00:11:06] And they're like, Oh, it stinks in here. And that's the organic fertilizer or even the chemical fertilizers that are still producing a little bit of the smell. Okay.
[00:11:15]The other key is whether you're using organic fertilizer or chemical fertilizer is timing. We go through we recommend fertilize and early spring or late winter, early spring. In late spring, may June timeframe with organic fertilizer and then pick it up again in the fall in September.
[00:11:32]That way, you've got the consistency that the fertilizer that's not going to produce a ton of nitrogen at any given time. You gotta be consistent about applying it so that it's readily available to the plant. If you were doing a chemical fertilizer, I would use that more as a corrective mode.
[00:11:51]If a plant's been in for a year or two and it's not actively growing, and you want to speed it up, or if you've got a hedge of trees and there's the higher side, that's dry. You get four or five plants that are lagging on the rest of it. Then I would go in and use something stronger than nitrogen so that you're really pushing those five plants to catch up with the rest of them.
[00:12:14] Joe Woolworth: I've seen that before, and I wonder how you fix that. Say you plant like a row of shrubs or bushes or something, and some of them are doing good, and some are not so good. You can help. Yeah,
[00:12:23] Keith Ramsey: exactly. As a well-balanced or chemical fertilizer would, at that point, it would be a good idea.
[00:12:28] So that those plants are actually getting a little bit more of a boost than the rest of them. And. With organic fertilizer, you really can't burn. You can't over-fertilize. So you could fertilize the whole row with organic fertilizers. You're continuing to build and then add a chemical fertilizer to those four or five plants that are lagging.
[00:12:44]As far as lawns go, we really recommend it. Most companies will fertilize heavily in the spring. It's effortless to throw fertilizer on and see a lawn improve.
[00:12:55] We like to fertilize in the fall. So you're pushing the seed that just germinated this one blade to get to about 25 blades of grass. So I'm pushing it three times the fertilization and at least in the fall. And then when we have these periods of rain, adding more organic fertilizer than that even.
[00:13:11]So that lawn is green and actively growing. It's a cool-season grass. It wants to grow actively from September until May, and then it wants to go dormant. So if you fertilize it heavy in the spring, you're pushing growth and Sallie longish, and then you'll end up with disease problems in the plants, and the grass plant fails.
[00:13:29]Hotter, drier spots. You'll see that the grass fades out. If you're fertilized in September, October, December, and the grass is green going into spring; I recommend not fertilizing at all in the spring. If you still see a yellow lawn and it's not actively growing, then it's a good idea to wake it up and go ahead and do fertilization.
[00:13:46]In the spring is when we handle most of the week control. So you're doing pre-emergence post-emergence. February 15th through March 15th is a good time for the first pre-emergence, and then six weeks after that for the second, a pre-merger will keep any of the weeds from germinating post-emergence.
[00:14:02] If you're spraying the weeds that are existing. I like to wait until it warms up for that. A good rule of thumb is after dandelions have completely bloomed out. Bees, it's honeybees. We'll use dandelions as a good natural source of nectar early in Poland, early in the season.
[00:14:18] So if you wait until they bloom out and spray them later on, you're not affecting pollinators and bees. So if you've got weeds that you want to get rid of, Postemergence, if you use them in a low application, won't kill Clover. So you can kill most of the other broadleaf weeds and maintain the Clover in your lawn because Clover is not a bad mix to a lawn.
[00:14:38]But if anybody ever has questions, I think it's hard. Often, when you walk into a hardware store or a box store to get the answers you're looking for, visiting a local garden center or talking to a horticulturalist is a great place to start, bring in plants, bring in clippings.
[00:14:57] Keith Ramsey: Nobody around it used to be a different scenario, knowing stuff. Yeah. I, that it used to be a different scenario. You could actually find tradespeople in a box store, and it's just, it's a thing of the past now. I think all local family-owned garden centers are very similar in the fact that they.
[00:15:13]They pride themselves on their knowledge and being able to solve problems for people. Bringing in leaves that are off-color or bringing in pictures of the plants stems if a plant dies and bringing in the entire plan if you can we always ask the people, bag them up, so they're not spreading in sector diseases, but we were always happy to diagnose the issue and then point them in the right direction so they can solve it.
Creators & Guests
What is In The Garden?
In the Garden with Keith Ramsey is a podcast aimed at helping you grow and maintain a beautiful and healthy garden and landscape.
Each podcast will focus on a new specific topic. Check back every two weeks for the latest episode!