How to apply Fertilizer to your garden.

We apply fertilizer to make our plants grow better. But when do we apply fertilizer? And how do we apply fertilizer to the garden?.

What’s fertilizer?

Think of fertilizers as nutritional supplements. Plants need a variety of life-sustaining nutrients—such as nitrogen and phosphorus—which they take up from the soil.

Fertilizers are plant nutrients that are added to the soil. The plants absorb these essential nutrients from the soil to improve health, growth, and productivity. Soil nutrient deficiencies reduce and modify plant growth.

You can also tell which nutrients your soil is lacking by the deficiency symptoms they display, which can range from yellow leaves (lack of nitrogen) to reduced flowering (lack of phosphorus) to weak stems (lack of potassium) to blossom-end rot (lack of calcium).

Not all soil needs fertilizer. Think about a natural setting where fallen leaves and plants decompose in place. Nutrients are naturally recycled into the soil and made available to growing plants. If your soil is rich in nutrients and the microbial life that aids in the plants’ uptake of these nutrients, then adding more can upset that healthy ecosystem. In fact, more fertilizer is not better! Plants use only the nutrients that they need. To absorb more than are unnecessary can result in abnormal growth.

However, many garden soils do need fertilizer, especially if the soil has been cultivated previously. If you’ve grown and harvested plants in your garden in the past, they have taken up nutrients from the soil, and those nutrients need to be replaced before more plants are grown there. This is where fertilizer (organic or processed) plays a role.

Fertilizer replaces lost nutrients, which ensures that soil nutrient levels are at an acceptable level for healthy growth.

Our next post will be when do we apply fertilizer? And how do we apply fertilizer to the garden? In one page, we’ll cover the basics of using fertilizer.

Happy gardening, Yours in the garden Farm2Markt