Testing 5 Different Fertilizers For Growing Peppers - Pepper Geek

hey there welcome back to pepper geek in today's video we'll be testing five different fertilizers and seeing which one grows the best pepper plants so today marks the beginning of this experiment it is april 21st so we'll be following the recommended guidelines by the manufacturer of each fertilizer we have garden tone from a spoma which we've used in the past we have dr earth's organic tomato fertilizer which we haven't used before we have fox farms trio of liquid fertilizers which we have used miracle grow performance organics which is an organic variant of miracle grows all-purpose fertilizer and then we have miracle grows all-purpose plant food which is an inorganic water-soluble fertilizer so the jalapeno seedlings are ready for transplanting they were planted on march 21st so they've been alive for about a month they're actually a little bit overdue but they're all the same right now they look very similar they're all looking very healthy so i've made a very simple soil solution which is two parts peat moss to one part topsoil and then one part perlite for a little bit better drainage and we're going to be using this same simple mixture nutrient free for the plants in these three and a half inch pots and once they outgrow these three and a half inch pots they'll move into two gallon containers like this all the same size so today i'm just gonna transplant and give them their first feed of the various fertilizers so this is the garden tone going in here i'm just mixing that up really well and the other is dr earth's and mix that in thoroughly so these are the first two that i will transplant doesn't really matter which plant goes where i'm just going to choose randomly and pop them in see there's our first seedling and this is going to be our dr earth's tomato food pop it in pack it down next one is going to be a spoma's garden tone so already those are definitely the easiest two i know that these are going to be more tricky because i'm going to have to mix very small batches of these fertilizers just to feed them once and then on an ongoing basis so now these three have just plain soil so now i'm going to distribute the fertilizer into the remaining three and then water them in and we'll check back in a few weeks to see how the plants are doing okay so here's a quick check in three weeks later the plants are almost ready to be transplanted again so far the fox farm plant is the tallest and most healthy looking of the group miracle grow plant food and organics are also doing pretty well and have light green foliage the dr earthson espoma garden tone plants have a much different look with darker foliage a shorter height and both showing more significant signs of plant edema i suspect this has to do with the fertilizers not being water soluble and here just comparing the garden tone and fox farm plants there's clearly a significant difference in development so far with the fox farm plant looking much healthier and sturdier so just a few days later the plants were ready for transplant so i mixed up a larger batch of our simple soil mixture and got the plants into larger pots again it's pretty easy to see the difference in both color and size of the different fertilizers the miracle grow plants are in red pots fox farm is in a green pot and the two granular organic fertilizers are in gray pots garden tone and dr earth's look pretty sad at this point but let's not lose hope just yet everyone loves a good comeback story right so now in early june all the plants have continued to grow and are looking pretty good fox farm and the other water-soluble nutrients still appear to have a slight advantage but the organic granular fertilizers have certainly caught up a bit they still have a much deeper green color which is interesting the two non-organic plants are basically neck and neck both looking fairly healthy and sturdy we're also starting to see some flower buds forming at this point so fruit development is right around the corner and i did this many times throughout this test but here's one of the fertilizer applications while the plants were bigger espoma was applied once a month miracle grow organics is the most frequent at weekly fertilizing miracle grow plant food was bi-weekly fox farm is done at every other watering which is a bit tricky to maintain and dr earth's was every two months so in theory the simplest method of fertilizing okay so moving into early july all the plants have begun fruiting at this point interestingly the fox farm plant seems to have fallen behind at least in terms of plant size and vigor the fruits are certainly in the early stages of growth on all the plants but it actually seems like the granular fertilizer plants are maybe taking the lead here but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet now a week later i noticed some rot forming on a few of the jalapenos i'm fairly sure it was blossom and rot but either way i decided to pick the affected fruits and weigh them at this point the garden tone and dr earth's plants had the highest number of affected fruits but we'll get more into this in a bit one plant that showed no signs of this issue was the fox farm plant which had some huge pods on it despite being the smallest plant so about a month more later and that brings us to today which is harvest day some very notable results at this point the miracle grow plants are both fairly similar with a tall stature and broad leaves fox farm somehow looks like the runt of the group but the pods are absolutely massive just huge beautiful fruits despite a small plant size the two granular fertilizer plants grew tall and bushy but the pods had issues developing and most are on the smaller side with that it was time to harvest so i picked all full-sized fruits off the plants leaving almost none remaining and with that let's head inside and see the results okay so back inside with a ton of jalapenos and we're going to weigh each batch to see which plant produced the heaviest yields at least for the first harvest and i think this is a good time of year to test this the plants will continue to produce but at this stage i think it's a good time to judge how well the fertilizer has done so we're going to measure in grams and i've teared this scale and we're going to start off with miracle grow performance organics 399 grams off of this and it also had the highest number of pods which is 15 for this little stage not bad this is miracle grow plant foods so the non-organic version of miracle grow and that has 360 grams and also one less pod off of the plant so 14 pods and 360 grams this is fox farm it only has nine pods but i have a feeling this is going to be one of the heavier these pods are just huge and meaty and thick these are the kind of jalapenos i really want to harvest honestly if i had to choose a plate point blank this is the one i would go for just based on the size alone they're just really impressive 390 grams so actually a little bit lower than miracle growth performance organics and definitely less pods but they're definitely heavier pods dr earth's not a great showing for this the plants were pretty large but the yield doesn't look very good the pods are much smaller and there are only 10 pods here coming in at a weight of 233 grams so much much lower and last and kind of potentially least as well is a spoma garden tone i really like this fertilizer for in-ground beds and raised beds but in this particular test it doesn't seem to have done very well we have some blossom end rot or some sun squall potentially a lot of problematic pods smaller pods and a pretty low yield only 11 at this time so and these come in at a weight of just a hundred and sixty-two grams so definitely not a good showing for a spoma garden tone in this case i had hopes for this because it's so simple you just throw it in the soil and let it sit for a month you don't have to do much just water but the results are not very stellar in this case so we did harvest a few fruits off of these plants early as we were seeing that blossom and rot forming so we would pick those off i did still weigh them so we're still taking them into account so i have the numbers for every single jalapeno that we've harvested from any of these plants so far rotted or not so here are some of the more interesting conclusions fox farm has the heaviest overall usable weight at 432 grams all of those were usable fruits meaning that none of them had cracking or blossom enrot they were also the heaviest fruits by far with an average of 43 grams per jalapeno compare that to the next heaviest which is miracle grow organics at just 26.4 grams per fruit now ironically the overall loser here was espoma garden tone but it happened to also produce the largest number of fruits at 19 but only six of those were considered usable fruits the rest of them succumbed to blossom end rot and the overall usable weight from that plant came in at just 100 grams less than 25 of that of fox farm on the flip side fox farm had just 10 overall fruits so far the plant is definitely the shortest it looks the least healthy but overall at the end of the day what you want are fruits and fox farm delivered the heaviest overall harvest weight including rotted fruits came from the miracle grow plant food plant at 439 grams just edging out fox farm but only 13 of the 17 fruits were usable so that knocked the overall usable weight to 343 grams miracle grow organics did pretty well here with a 422 grams of harvest weight but there were a few unusable fruits and that knocked it down to 339 grams of overall usable weight but it did have the next highest average fruit weight and a pretty respectable overall harvest especially compared to the other two organic options so there is a lot to conclude here the first thing i want to say is that this was really not a scientific experiment if we wanted real usable results here we would have had to grow many many more plants we only had five plants and each of them was treated differently so it's really not scientific this is really just for entertainment purposes but definitely some interesting results one of the most interesting to me is the size of these fox farm fruits i really can't wrap my head around why these are so much bigger the plant got a better start in the season it looked the largest but over time it actually ended up being the smallest plant but with the heaviest yield and the biggest overall fruits i think one of the most important things to consider here is the original soil recipe that we used if you remember it's really just peat moss a little bit of perlite and some topsoil and that's it so the espoma and the dr earth's organic non-water soluble formulas didn't do very well in the plants we're running into issues i think the plants were having a difficult time using the nutrients that are there in that fertilizer because obviously the fertilizers have what plants need but i think in the soil mixture that i used the plants weren't really able to make use of that nutrient content on the other hand the water soluble ones did much better and i think essentially these plants that were using water soluble nutrients especially in the case of fox farm which is a liquid nutrient were essentially grown hydroponically and you could consider the soil to be sort of just a medium that the roots were growing in so i think the reason we got such drastically different results from organic to inorganic and water soluble is for that reason all of these nutrients were much more readily available immediately accessible to the plant so when we would water with fox farm the plant could immediately take those nutrients up through the roots it doesn't have to wait for it to be broken down by bacteria that may or may not have been present in the soil so which fertilizer would i recommend which one would i choose if i had to pick just one for the future it would be between fox farm and the miracle grow performance organics we've always recommended these two fertilizers and it's interesting to see that both of them have prevailed in this test at least they've given us good results with our potted plants with our in-ground plants but we've also seen really good success using a spoma garden tone in our raised beds so if you're growing in the ground or in raised beds any of these fertilizers are going to help your plants grow it's just a matter of can the plants actually make use of the nutrients that are there if you do find yourself compelled to try one of these fertilizers they are all good we'll leave links down below where you can get them online if you're interested but again don't take this as a conclusive result for the best fertilizer to use to grow peppers other factors like the soil media that you're using are going to play a bigger role in the end result i know this wasn't a perfect test and we had some issues come up and we tried to address them as best as possible but what did you think tell me what i did wrong and what we can do better in the future maybe we'll do another one next year let us know in the comments if you have any recommended fertilizers that you would like to see us test in the future maybe something good for potted plants that we could test against the winners of this test thanks so much for watching peppergeek and i'll see you next time

Channel: Pepper Geek

Views: 128,870

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Id: WkOGNh5VaQM

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022