The UGLY TRUTH About FERTILIZERS You Need To Hear NOW!

what's going on gardeners it's Sunday March 19th and it is almost officially spring here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina and on today's video I want to address a very controversial subject because now is the time of year that we need to talk fertilizers fertilizers may be one of the most misunderstood things out there and on today's video I want to explain when you absolutely must use fertilizers in your garden when you can reduce their use and maybe even avoid them all together and why it seems that fertilizers are just so misunderstood whether you agree or disagree with any of the things that I say in this video I would really like your feedback please post a comment give me your take on things I'd love to hear it if you're new to the Channel please consider subscribing and hitting the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon storefront and spreadshop in the video description for a list of the gardening products I use and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated anytime I make a tutorial video on this channel where I show you how I fertilize things I always get a good bit of pushback in the comments section and it's probably why honestly a lot of garden channels avoid the fertilizing subject altogether and I don't really blame them however I want to do my best to try and address some of these comments I usually get pushback about fertilizing in two different forms the first form is the idea that fertilizer is too expensive and if you're going to spend all this money to fertilize your garden it really defeats the purpose of gardening and you may as well just buy food from the grocery store and the second bit of pushback is the idea that if you're fertilizing your garden you're doing something wrong because nature doesn't need fertilizer so if you actually need fertilizer in your garden it's because you're not allowing the soil to do the work for you so I want to do my best to try and address these two comments and have an open discussion hopefully down in the comments section below and I'll give you my honest take on things the first point that I want to address is the idea that fertilizer is not required at all in your garden and you just need to let the soil will do the work for you and the idea here usually is that you can grow food without the addition of fertilizers when you focus on soil biology and composting that way the soil does the work for you and while I think there are valid points to this I think that there is a mixing of various principles from permaculture and food forestry that don't necessarily work in vegetable gardening let me explain the rear of my property backs up into a forest and obviously we're not going out and fertilizing a forest it is a completely self-sustaining system so the idea is if Forest can sustain itself can't every system sustain itself that's the very principle behind permaculture where we can design our own food Forest that will flourish whether we intervene or not and that is obviously a proven concept as long as we are selecting species and varieties of fruit trees that are reasonable for our Zone and our climate then yes once you plant all of these fruit trees and you you intervene just enough to get them established to the point where you don't need to nurse them anymore yes they can become self-sustaining when planned properly a food Forest will become a self-sustaining ecosystem that's because each individual tree when you add up all of the individual roots and you place them next to each other they will stretch for Miles so they have the ability to find food and nutrients all over the Earth these trees will also act like a self-mulching forest whether they're deciduous or Evergreen they will lose their leaves every single year in various patterns and all of those leaves will fall to the ground and re-mulch the soil that will then turn into compost and that will then feed the trees all over again for another life cycle yes it's a little more complicated than that because tree is also do draw nutrients out of the air and there are things that probably I don't even understand about the systems that make it work but the point is once it is established I could leave this house house for 30 years and come back and the food Forest will still be standing and still be producing without my intervention so when planting fruit trees or designing a food forest for some type of permaculture system you will need to give them fertilizer in the beginning after you transplant them and for the next few seasons to help them establish and grow big and strong but there will come a point where they become self-sustaining because the root system and its own self-mulching system can largely handle the needs of the tree itself now for me I will always give my trees some fertilizer because it increases their fruit production however it doesn't become mandatory at a certain point and I have no doubt that if I left this house and did not come back for 30 years this fig tree right here would still be alive and producing fruit but this is not true for your vegetable garden your vegetable garden is unsustainable Yes you heard me correctly your vegetable garden is not sustainable it's a freak of nature it's a man-made thing nowhere in nature will you find a vegetable garden growing and this is the case for two distinct reasons the first reason is that the plants that we grow in our vegetable garden in no way represents the wild types of the plants and I'm not talking about anything GMO I'm talking about the simple Act of seed saving over Generations the goal of nature is to reproduce so in order for nature to reproduce best it wants its fruits to be small full of seeds and have a relatively low sugar content because they are less likely to be eaten and the seeds are more likely to be dropped to the ground those are the dominant genetic traits that nature wants however we save seeds largely for recessive traits those big heirloom tomatoes that weigh a pound each and have very few seeds and are all meat nature doesn't want them and that's why they are so susceptible to pests and diseases they're not a natural creation there is nothing less natural than we're growing in our common vegetable gardens than these heirloom fruits that have been protected for 50 plus years from cross-pollination cross-pollination and hybridization is the law of Nature and we are preventing the natural order of things from taking place these large fruited Behemoth plants demand a lot of nutrition for the soil nature wasn't cut out to produce a whole garden full of these guys they need a lot of food the second problem is we're also planting all of these plants in really high density when it comes to vegetable gardening high density is the name of the game to maximize yields and the fact is the soil biology on its own the native nutrients in the soil cannot sustain this high density planting with these super vigorous super saved seeds that have these monster fruits on them it just can't keep up and because we are planting things so unnaturally and we're demanding so much from our soil we have to add back to that soil artificially and that's where fertilizers come in so remember when I said if I left my yard for 30 years and there was no human intervention on this property at all I could come back and I would still will have my fig trees and my apple trees and my peach trees and my persimmon trees producing well what would happen if I planted out my entire Garden in May and then I just left and I never came back for 30 years what would I find 30 years later the answer is I would find a garden Full Of Weeds and Native grasses that have taken over the area and probably maybe a handful of plants that were Hardy enough for my location that have cross-pollinated so many times over that whatever fruit they have have basically moved back and now resemble the original wild type and are nothing like what I had originally planted from those saved seeds the reason why that is true is because there is no truly sustainable vegetable garden at least not a true vegetable garden as we consider a vegetable garden to be so my point in all of this is if you're growing a vegetable garden at least in the traditional sense that most of us see a vegetable garden to be there's no way to truly make it permaculture while you can have a permaculture Food Forest that you can reduce or eliminate fertilizing in the long run with your vegetable garden because of what we're growing and how we're growing it it is always going to demand more from the soil than it can put back into the soil and for that reason we have to add external fertilizing now let's address the second point which is discontinuing the use of fertilizers and using compost instead to fertilize your garden my answer to that is compost is not fertilizer we do not add compost to our Gardens to fertilize it we add compost to our Gardens to add organic matter into the soil and feed that microbiome to keep it a very healthy growing medium for growing our plants yes there is a fertilizer component to compost but it's not why we add compost let me explain to determine how much fertilizer is in a product we consult the NPK ratio on the bag with the NPK ratio the first number is the percentage of Elemental nitrogen by weight in the fertilizer the the second number is the percentage of weight of phosphorus in the fertilizer and the third number is the percentage of weight of potassium in the fertilizer so just to keep things simple if we were to go out and buy a 100 pound bag of 10 10 10 fertilizer the contents of that bag would be 10 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer 10 pounds of phosphorus fertilizer 10 pounds of potassium fertilizer and the other 70 pounds would be some inert medium yesterday I went to Lowe's and I bought this very popular National brand of cow manure compost for 5.98 and this is listed as an NPK ratio of 0.5.5 that means the contents of this bag is half a percent nitrogen half a percent phosphorus and half a percent potassium per the guaranteed analysis on the back of the bag it assumes a net weight of 35 pounds so if we take the 35 pounds and we multiply it by 1.5 percent because that is the total amount of fertilizer in the bag we see that this bag contains 0.525 pounds of fertilizer per bag so since each bag costs 5.98 that means we are paying approximately 11.39 per pound of fertilizer let's compare that cost to a typical water-soluble fertilizer this is a one and a half pound box of 18 18 21 that you can buy for 6.98 that means this is 57 percent fertilizer when you add up all the npks this 1.5 pound box has .855 pounds of fertilizer since we paid 6.98 for this this brings our cost of fertilizer down to eight dollars and 16 cents a pound which is 40 percent less expensive than fertilizing your garden with compost and remember this is a very exaggerated claim because this is assuming Peak prices of fertilizer moving into the growing season yes you can save money on compost when you buy it by the truckload versus going to the store and buying bags however the cost of compost doesn't really change all that much throughout the season every fall I show you how to go to big box stores and buy out their fertilizer when it's all on clearance I get up to 70 to 80 percent off every single season so because of this I dramatically reduce the costs feeding my garden by using real fertilizers instead of paying a hefty premium to use compost as a fertilizer in addition in order to run this analysis I had to use Black Cow brand compost because it is the only compost product I could find that had a guaranteed analysis on it because they are a large brand they probably have a lot of dollars reserved to marketing so it's worth it for them to run the guaranteed analysis if you're making your own compost at home or you're buying compost from a smaller brand or from a local landscaping supply company they're probably not doing that so you're going to get compost that doesn't have nearly as much fertilizer in it as the product effect that I used so no matter what you do compost cannot compare to fertilizer when it comes to NPK my point here is not to knock compost I use a ton of compost in my yard and garden every single year my point is that compost isn't fertilizer if you treat it as fertilizer it will be the most expensive way to feed your garden I'm simply trying to show you how to do this a cheaper more efficient way you still need to add compost to feed your soil and to make that microbiome really healthy however you shouldn't rely only on compost to feed your garden you should buy fertilizers because it will dramatically reduce the price especially when you buy your fertilizers in the fall when they go on clearance you will save a ton of money and especially if you buy the bulk size clearance items however there is a loophole to make everything I just said about prices null and void after two years of saving and searching last week I finally had the privilege of becoming a member of the pickup truck Club I I purchased a used pickup truck and this allows me to exploit some loopholes that make gardening a whole lot less expensive start checking at your county and your neighboring County's landfills because many of them are responsible for their own tree trimming and maintenance of the right of ways of the various highways so they wind up with a ton of organic material that they don't have anything to do with and it costs them a ton of money to get rid of so what they do is they have certain days of the week where you can come and take all the free mulch that you want and sometimes they even have free compost if you have a pickup truck you can now call around and find out if they have the items in stock and you can go there and load up the back of your truck completely for free and that will blow the budget out of the water because you will be able to get basically as much compost and free fertilizer for your garden as you're willing to put your back into and put the time into now you may be thinking I'm not spending thousands of dollars to save money on compost well if you own a pickup truck you know that it's an investment in an overall quality of life Improvement and given everything I do in my garden it's really worth the investment to me however if you don't own a pickup truck or a pickup truck is not the cards for you you probably know someone that does so maybe buy them lunch or buy them dinner and have them take you over to the landfill and you can go pick up your own free compost and mulch yourself so for those of you that think you don't have enough money to fertilize your garden between the fall clearance sales on fertilizer that tip I just gave you and also the free compost and mulch tip from your county that I just gave you that should help put your mind at ease if you find the money it takes to grow your own vegetables may be a little bit costly but remember due to the nature of vegetable gardening you will have to get some amount of fertilizer and compost but there are affordable ways that you can do it but before I conclude this video I wanted to take a moment and discuss container gardening because container gardens break all the rules because you're confined to this little space to grow your plants you do not have a significant microbiome like you would find in ground in Earth and because of that reason the granulated organic fertilizers are not the best they don't break down quickly enough and using compost can also be a problem because you're only going to have about a two or three inch lip in the container to apply compost so you really can't put more than like a one inch layer in there and then you'll have to remove it to add more it's a big pain so when you contain our garden in order to keep your trees sated you really should use water-soluble fertilizers so things like Jack's all-purpose 20 20 20 or a miracle grow tomato or if you want to stay completely organic you can use things like fish Emulsion kelp meal and Alaska more Bloom which is quite a bit more expensive but that's what you have to do unfortunately to stay completely organic in a container garden and it's why I blend my fertilizers usually with a mix of fish Emulsion and things like Jack's all-purpose 20 20 20 in order to reduce costs when growing things in containers so I just wanted to take a moment and address the importance of using water-soluble fertilizers in your container garden due to the lack of microbiome and the lack of soil Mass so now that spring is imminent I'm really glad I took this moment to discuss these various topics of fertilizing because I know how controversial they can be I hope I made a strong case for why I believe what I believe whether you agree or disagree I would love to hear your feedback and your experience so please comment down in the comments below and we can have a discussion about these various topics I really enjoyed making this video and stay tuned because pretty soon I will have a video on how to fertilize your fruit trees as they come out of dormancy now that spring is upon us so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and ring that notification Bell so you're notified when we release more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products that I use in real life in my garden they are all linked Down Below in my Amazon storefront in the video description so expand that video description to see everything I use in real life and while you're there check out my spreadshop for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video if there's one thing Dale knows it's good food and we're going to give Dale the best treat of fig dipped in a little bit of peanut butter oh and he's being very good patiently waiting ready buddy be gentle good boy how's that wonderful way to start the day

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 107,644

Keywords: how to fertilize vegetable gardens, how to fertilize fruit trees, fertilizers, fertilizer, fertilizing, fertilize a garden, compost, permaculture, sustainable, truth about fertilizers, truth, free, garden, gardening, vegetable garden, fruit tree, fruit trees, organic gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening tips and tricks, gardening hacks, garden hacks, food forest, edible landscaping, growing, organic, plants, vegetables, how to, diy, millennial gardener, the millennial gardener

Id: pZ8EzQtuMws

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023