Ideal Fertilizer Blends

In this segment we're going to talk about making the ideal organic or buying the ideal commercial garden fertilizer. Generally speaking you don't want a bunch of nitrogen to spur a bunch of vegetative growth. You want either flower production in flower gardens or produce, tomatoes, peppers or whatever you are growing in your garden. The shotgun approach is the way you probably need to go about it. When you've looked at your plants and you've tried to detect a deficiency by the color of the plant. There are a lot of if ands and buts. You know we talked in a previous segment about yellow being nitrogen, and purple leaf being phosphorous and less than green being potassium. But that's not always true there are numerous micro nutrients and other things that can effect the coloration of the leaf. So if your going to make a fertilizer let's talk about the shotgun approach. Generally speaking, you'll be buying a fertilizer or making a fertilizer that has the numbers are the same. Such as, this is a commercial fertilizer for gardens. It's a 6-7-7. But you'll be trying to make like a 6-6-6 or a 7-7-7, 6-6-6 might not be a good number. But anyway this is a commercial fertilizer that is already set up like that. To make one out of organic materials, we can go to bone meal or blood meal. Bone meal having 10% phosphorous and no nitrogen and blood meal having 12% nitrogen and no phosphorous so you can mix the two of these together, half and half, that will cut these percentages in half, you would end up with a 6-5 and to get a 0 right here you would throw in some of this muriate of potash right here, it would be very little of it to get your potash. It would take a little calculation here because this is a 60% so it wouldn't take very much of the muriate to get the little bit of 5-6% of potassium that your looking for to get the grade of fertilizer that we're looking for, numbers all being the same.