How to Use Organic Fertilizers

Get to know fish emulsion and alfalfa pellets, composted manure and rock phosphate, greensand and Epsom salts. Make bone meal and blood meal your allies, and fertilize all parts of your landscape organically.

Things You'll Need

• Manure
• Compost Makers
• Cottonseed Meal
• Fertilizers
• Fish Emulsions
• Garden Spades
• Gardening Gloves
• Hoes
• Seaweed Fertilizers
• Spreaders
• Watering Cans
• Epsom Salts
• Measuring Spoons
• Epsom salts

Instructions

1. Survey your landscape for its nutrition needs. Fertilize shrubs and trees annually, bulbs and perennials twice a year, lawns three times, houseplants monthly during the growing season, and annual flowers and vegetables more frequently.

2. Take the first step toward using organic fertilizers - make compost. Use leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds, eggshells, kitchen and garden waste - stop throwing the stuff away and pile it up somewhere to decompose (see Related eHows).

3. Change your expectations for successful gardening to appreciate thrifty growth for longer-lived plants. Grow organically for continuous and steadily emerging new leaves and flowers with nice color, not fast growth you can see overnight.

4. Provide long-term nutrition to organic soils by adding compost for nitrogen, bone meal or rock phosphate for phosphorus, and greensand for potassium. Test your soil before amending the first time, and test any time the garden has a chronic problem you can't solve otherwise.

5. Supply nutrition to your plants separately from your soil. Apply compost to lawns after spring greenup, at midseason and again in late summer - water during a prolonged drought to keep the fertilizer available.

6. Water bulbs, perennials, houseplants and annuals with fish emulsion or seaweed fertilizers beginning in spring. Use alfalfa pellets and meals made of cottonseed, blood or fish for supplemental nitrogen - plants and worms will benefit.

7. Fertilize shrubs and trees after they bloom or as evergreens begin new growth in the spring. Use a balanced organic fertilizer and mulch with compost - replace as it decomposes.

Tips & Warnings

• Interpret soil-test results with this formula: to apply a recommendation of 3 pounds of an element (say phosphorus) over 1000 square feet, divide the number of pounds you need (3) by the percent of that nutrient in the fertilizer (it'll be on the label; for example, bone meal is 20 percent phosphorus). Three divided by 20 percent equals 15 pounds per 1000 square feet.

• Sprinkle cottonseed or fish meal on top of soil and under mulch annually to feed your earthworms.