Soil fertilizer

[Tskeff]

I’m buying sphagum peat, lime, cow manure compost, fish meal, bone meal, blood meal, perlite, and lime and coffee grounds for my variety of fruit plants. Anyone have any recommended brands that won’t break the bank?

 

[Chuck]

I’m buying sphagum peat, lime, cow manure compost, fish meal, bone meal, blood meal, perlite, and lime and coffee grounds for my variety of fruit plants. Anyone have any recommended brands that won’t break the bank?

Unless a particular plant needs more acidity than is present in your soil you do not need any peat at all. Peat has no nutritional value. About all it does is provide acidity and it helps retain water and lime is used to raise soil Ph so apparently your soil is already acidic. If you buy fish meal, bone meal and blood meal separately this will get rather pricey quickly. These three things are normally used as amendments to the soil for a particular plant rather than for general use. For general use a good organic manure based fertilizer such as Medina, Fox Farm, Espoma or any other of a number of organic fertilizers is a much better and less expensive choice. When starting a garden a really good thing to do is get a comprehensive soil test, a test that SHOWS WHAT IS AVAILABLE AS UPTAKE to the plants and NOT a test that only shows what is in the soil. Most tests only show the latter.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Unless a particular plant needs more acidity than is present in your soil you do not need any peat at all. Peat has no nutritional value. About all it does is provide acidity and it helps retain water and lime is used to raise soil Ph so apparently your soil is already acidic. If you buy fish meal, bone meal and blood meal separately this will get rather pricey quickly. These three things are normally used as amendments to the soil for a particular plant rather than for general use. For general use a good organic manure based fertilizer such as Medina, Fox Farm, Espoma or any other of a number of organic fertilizers is a much better and less expensive choice. When starting a garden a really good thing to do is get a comprehensive soil test, a test that SHOWS WHAT IS AVAILABLE AS UPTAKE to the plants and NOT a test that only shows what is in the soil. Most tests only show the latter.

That is a really good point, availability is very confusing at first.