10 Fertilizer Myths That Will Save You Money 💲💲💲 Learn to Fertilize Correctly

10 fertilizer myths that will save you money i guarantee it fertilizers are very misunderstood by gardeners and manufacturers of products take advantage of that they sell you things you don't really need now you buy these products you put them on your soil and things grow and so you assume hey that worked but you don't know it worked unless you did a proper control and i know most you don't do controls without them you don't actually know the product worked i grow over 3000 different plants most of them grow quite well i don't use any of these products and i'll discuss that in more detail at the end of this video i'm going to try to go through these topics fairly quickly but i do want you to understand them but if you want more detail i've written articles on many of these topics and i'll put links to those in the description below let me clarify the word fertilizer when i use the term i'm including both synthetic and organic fertilizer if i want to be more specific i'll call it synthetic fertilizer or organic fertilizer plant-specific fertilizer i think this is the largest myth in gardening that there's such a thing as specific formulations for a particular type of plant by plant-specific i'm talking about things like rose fertilizer orchid fertilizer tomato fertilizer african violet fertilizer and so on none of these products actually exist except in the minds of marketing people and in the minds of those customers that have been convinced to buy those products and you can demonstrate this for yourself very easily and i've done this for you here let's have a look at rose fertilizer so i've gone to google and searched for images of rose fertilizer products and i've made a collage of the ones i found these are all specific plant fertilizers for roses they're all made by experts who know what roses need so let's have a look at these in the top left hand corner is a fertilizer that has a formulation of 6 12 16 nitrogen phosphate and potassium that last number is the potassium 16. that tells me that this manufacturer believes roses need a lot of potassium now let's look at the bottom right corner this formulation is a four six two oh this manufacturer believes that roses need very little potassium but they need a lot more phosphate the one in the middle is a 14 12 11. that's almost a balanced formula equal amounts of each of those nutrients so this manufacturer is saying hey you just need equal amounts of everything and in fact if you look at each one of these everyone has a different formulation and yet they're all experts in producing rose fertilizer how can they all be perfect for roses when they're all different well they simply can't be at most one is right and the others are wrong but even that one is wrong and i'll explain that in a second there is no such thing as plant-specific fertilizer most plants take in nutrients in the ratio of three one two more nitrogen very small amount of phosphate and some potassium if you get a fertilizer with that ratio you can feed everything with it but that leads me into myth number two the idea that we feed plants is a myth plants aren't like people where we spoon feed food into them plants use their roots to collect the nutrients that they need we don't feed plants what we do is we replace the missing nutrients in soil if soil has all the nutrients plants need we don't have to add any fertilizer if soil is deficient say in nitrogen we have to add nitrogen we don't have to add the other nutrients if a soil is deficient in potassium we have to add potassium but we don't have to add nitrogen or phosphate or anything else we should add the nutrients that soil is missing when we fertilize now that may seem like semantics to you but if you spend a little time thinking about it you'll realize how important this concept is what it means is that none of the manufactured fertilizers out there are correct it also means that nobody online can tell you what fertilizer you should use in your garden because none of them know what your soil is missing your job as a gardener is to add the nutrients that are missing in soil myth number three epsom salts this one is so common online and in books and videos everybody is telling you you need epsom salts it's a great fertilizer well if you have a look at the package it tells you what's in it magnesium and sulfate sulfate is the ionic form of sulfur that plants use so it's adding magnesium and sulfur well as it turns out most soil has lots of magnesium so it doesn't need any more and in fact most oil has enough sulfur too plants only need a very small amount of sulfur in that case magnesium sulfate does nothing for your soil now if you're deficient in magnesium or sulfur then it will help plants grow but if you need either one of those nutrients there are much better options for instance if you're deficient in sulfur use agricultural sulfur it's much less expensive i haven't found a single reason to use epsom salts in the garden myth four bloom boosters and bone meal the claim for both of these products is that they will give you more flowers and that's completely wrong these products contain a lot of phosphate that middle number and the belief is that phosphate makes plants make more flowers and that's just simply not true if you look at the basic biochemistry of plants every cell in the plant needs about the same nutrient roots leaves stems flowers fruits they all have about the same amount of phosphate same on a nitrogen same amount of potassium adding extra phosphate will not make more flowers and there's lots of research to show that but for some reason gardeners still believe it the other issue we have is that phosphate is starting to accumulate in soils people are using too much of it and if they do that then you get runoff that goes into rivers and lakes and we get algae bloom problems so using too much phosphate actually hurts the environment now there's another thing about phosphate and that's how it moves through the soil profile but i'll discuss that in a separate video that i'll link to at the end of this one for now the message is don't add more phosphate to your soil unless you're deficient and most likely you're not deficient at number five transplant fertilizers so these are things that you're supposed to put in the planting hole when you move plants most of these have high phosphate and it's claimed that high phosphate grows better roots well just like blooms this is completely false all parts of the plants need the same nutrient phosphate in the soil will not make better roots in fact when you're transplanting things it's best not to fertilize them at all these plants will start using the nutrients that are in your soil and unless you have a specific deficiency they're going to get lots and nutrients from that soil so don't put anything into the planting hole number six what are salts and how do they relate to fertilizer i see a lot of people making the claim that i don't use synthetic fertilizer because it has too many salts in it and we know salts are bad for plants well that's partially a myth so let's have a closer look at salts the term is confusing because it's used in different ways in our common language we use salt in place of table salt and that's sodium chloride if you live in a cold area that gets a lot of snow you're also used to spreading salt on the driveway or on the walkway or the city puts it on the streets to stop the snow from icing up that is also usually sodium chloride now sodium chloride is toxic to plants and if you live up north you'll know that because things that grow right along the road usually get damaged by this salt sodium is toxic and will harm plants however the proper use of the word salts is to apply it to a whole range of compounds things like nitrate phosphate potassium magnesium calcium these are all salts and those are the nutrients plants need plants can't live without salts when we add synthetic fertilizer to the soil it immediately dissolves in water and releases those nutrients and those nutrients are salts they're good for plants now you can add too much you probably know that if you had too much fertilizer to your lawn it'll go brown and you can kill the roots so too much fertilizer too much salt is harmful to plants but in a reasonable amount it's absolutely necessary for plants to grow salts do not harm plants now let's have a look at the difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer to understand this i have to explain a little bit about what happens during the decomposition process we start out with a banana peel and that peel has lots of nutrients in there the problem is if i give that to a plant it's absolutely useless for the plant the banana peel does contain phosphate and nitrogen the plants can't use them because the nutrients are tied up in large molecules protein has a lot of nitrogen plants can't use it as long as it's protein chlorophyll the chemical that makes leaves green contains magnesium and nitrogen again the molecule is too big plants can't use it dna has a lot of phosphate in it again absolutely useless for plants until it decomposes so when things decompose these large molecules break down they become smaller and smaller and smaller until they're released as nutrients so at the end of that process we have nitrate we have phosphate we have potassium we have magnesium once they're in that form plants can use them while synthetic fertilizer it decomposes quickly it dissolves in water and breaks apart immediately so the nutrients from synthetic fertilizer are immediately available to plants the ones from organic fertilizer take time before that organic material can break down and release those nutrients so one of the key differences is how quickly do the nutrients come out of these fertilizers now let's have a look at one of these nutrients i'm going to pick nitrate so if we compare the nitrate molecule from a banana peel to the nitrate molecule from synthetic fertilizer this is what they look like can you spot the difference they're identical there is no difference neither plants nor humans or microbes all of which need nitrates none of them can tell the difference and if you send those molecules to a lab they can't tell the difference either once it's a nitrate molecule it doesn't matter where it came from from that perspective there is no difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer they both produce identical nutrients myth number eight salt kills microbes well you probably guessed by now that this is a complete myth i don't know where this one ever started but it's wrong microbes are really no different than plants they both need the same nutrients to grow nitrate phosphate potassium sulfate magnesium microbes need all those things as well so how can they be toxic to microbes when they're essential food for microbes they can't be now again huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer might harm microbes in the same way that it harms plants but reasonable amounts of synthetic fertilizer will not harm microbes in fact when farmers fertilize their fields what we find is the amount of microbes actually explode suddenly because there's excess food there and then once the nutrients are used up the population crashes back down so what is the real difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer well they produce the same nutrients that part makes them the same but there are two vital differences remember i told you that organic material are these large molecules that slowly have to decompose smaller and smaller before the nutrients are released well that takes a lot of time and in fact when you put compost on your soil takes about five years for this process to happen completely during that time a small amount of nutrients are released on a daily basis so organic fertilizer is a very slow feed synthetic happens right away and there's a fast feed that's a huge difference between the two now sometimes you need a fast feed like in a container or a house plant maybe even in the vegetable garden if you've got a short growing season you have to get those plants to really grow fast and the rest of the garden though you don't need a fast feed you want a slow steady feed to grow really good plants the other difference between the two is that organic fertilizer contains carbon and that carbon is critical for building good soil structure synthetic fertilizer adds no carbon so organic fertilizer is better but synthetic has a place myth number 10 foliar feeding now does this work and should you be doing it well it does work so when we spread fertilizer on the leaves there are small pores in the leaves that absorb those nutrients so nutrients will get into the plant quicker that way but there are a couple of limitations the first one is the plant can only absorb very small amounts of nutrients so for the macronutrients the nitrogen phosphate potassium calcium magnesium and so on it's not a very efficient way of feeding the plant it is good if your plant has a deficiency say an iron deficiency and you need to give it a real quick boost and you want that iron to get in the leaves quickly that does work but it's not a good long-term solution the other problem you have is that some of these nutrients move around the plant easily others don't so when we put calcium on the leaf as a fuller spray it does go into that leaf but it won't leave the leaf a lot of people will spray their tomato plants with calcium thinking that they can cure blossom end rot in the fruit that doesn't work because the plant can't move the calcium from the leaf to the fruit besides blossom end rot has nothing to do with calcium that's another myth it's a watering issue if you want more details on that have a look at my video on blossom end rot so foliar feeding does work it's great in agriculture for specific problems it's something the average gardener should stay away from so here's a bonus for you number 11 do you need to fertilize well i mentioned at the beginning of the program that i have three thousand different plants and i fertilize virtually nothing i don't put fertilizer in when i plant and i don't fertilize years later now there are some exceptions containers get fertilized because we water them a lot and we wash the nutrients out the bottom so they do need regular fertilizer i also fertilize my vegetable bed a little bit we have a very short growing season i need those plants to grow quickly and give me a crop before the snow flies so sometimes i do fertilize those but the rest of the garden never gets fertilized and i find things just grow fine and the main reason is that the purpose of fertilizing is to replace the nutrients that are missing i guess my soil isn't missing anything because stuff grows in it and if that's the case you don't need to add fertilizer now a little bit of compost once in a while does wonders but forget the fertilizer only fertilize when you know you have a deficiency if you like this video i have two others that are related to this topic the first one is how do you select the right fertilizer when you need it and i'll put a link to that in the top right hand corner the second one is that a lot of people like to use things from their kitchen to fertilize their plants things like the the water from boiling vegetables and say the water from eggs and beer and gold cold coffee and the list goes on and i made a video that looks at about 10 different things that people use from their kitchen to fertilize their house plants and i'll put a link to that in the bottom corner i hope i've saved you some money you

Channel: Garden Fundamentals

Views: 73,259

Keywords: fertilizer, synthetic fertilizer, organic fertilizer, rose fertilizer, epsom salts, sulfur, bloom booster, bone meal, transplant fertilizer, salts, fertilizer salts, nitrate, blossom end rot

Id: _NJK3LFeFhc

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022