Easy Organic Soil Mix for Beginners

^EM-1 (or BIM) is excellent.

like your avatar btw. one of my favorites.

 

Hey Kesey.
I think that the roots fertilizer you posted would be an excellent choice for the "dry organic fertilizer". Those ingredients are top-notch imo (soybean meal is iffy because of gmos but when buying a pre-blended fert you can't be as choosy as when you mix it yourself). I would absolutely use that fertilizer if it were available here. Good find!

But, you're right about mixing it into the soil vs using it as a top-dress. You can use one of the blends, or the other, or both (one would be fine I'm sure). Just mix it all in from the beginning. Clink is totally right about the whole "this for veg and this for flower" thing being way too hydro-ish. Plus it demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge about organic gardening. Organic amendments take a while to break down, so to get the most out of your "flowering" dry fert, you need to add it to the soil in the beginning. If you add it when you start flowering it's not going to do as much good.

One more thing- don't worry about NPK ratios. They are pretty much moot in an organic soil anyway since the plant is going to take up as much (or as little) N, P, K, micronutrients, etc. as it wants regardless of the ratio that we put in. Like you said, variety is good- the key is to have a variety of nutrients available from a variety of sources, and you're good to go.

 

^Thanks jerry, you have greatly contributed to my knowledge of organic gardening, so I really appreciate it!

 

^Hey Jmosley. I don't mind you posting that at all! Others may have the same concerns and hopefully that will help.

 

Hey Soul
First thing-I would suggest you try to find a farm/feed store in your area and do your shopping there. They will have a much better selection of amendments and better prices. It will make this a whole lot easier, trust me.

I'm not a huge fan of bone and blood meal (especially blood meal) and here's why:

1)There are far better nutrient sources for your plants. Blood and bone meal are sort of "one-hit wonders" in that they only provide one or a couple nutrients. I also like to use plant sources over animal sources since plant sources also provide many beneficial plant compounds in addition to the macro- and micronutrients. For example, both blood meal and alfalfa meal are good sources of N. That's where it stops for blood meal-it contains some minerals but not very much. Alfalfa meal, one the other hand, is a good source of N and contains P and K. Alfalfa meal also contains many micronutrients, most notably Ca. Alfalfa meal also contains 16 amino acids, plus beneficial plant compounds like triacontanol, a powerful compound that promotes growth and branching. Clearly, alfalfa meal is going to do more for our soil than blood meal.

2) Blood and bone meal are slaughterhouse by-products. Aside from the ick factor, we can be pretty sure that the pigs/cows that the bone/blood meal comes from were not raised organically without hormones, antibiotics, and all the rest of it. I want to keep that stuff out of my garden. Not to mention that, personally, I have a problem with the way we raise and process animals in this country, and I don't want to support that. It's not even from an animal welfare perspective (although the animals deserve better too), more a consumer welfare perspective-we deserve meat from healthy animals, not ones that are pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, stuffed full of GMO corn and soy, and spend their lives ankle deep in their own feces. Blood and bone meal also carry the potential of pathogens-there have been several cases in the UK where gardeners where infected with mad cow disease through bovine (cow) bone meal.

There will usually be some bone meal in most dry organic fertilizers, like tomato tone, and I'm okay with that. But I don't apply it on its own.

As far as NPK ratios and organic gardening, you're better off not worrying about them. Focus on providing nutrients from a variety of sources (this is where the dry organic fertilizer comes in), and not the specific NPK ratios. With chemical fertilizers, NPK is more important because those nutrients are going to be force-fed to the plant whether it wants them or not, so you need to make sure to have the right balance of nutrients. In an organic soil, our plants use what they need and leave what they don't, so the NPK is really irrelevant-as long as you've got those nutrients in the soil, it doesn't matter what the specific NPK ratio is.

That Medinas fertilizer sounds good. If the price is right, you could just buy that and not have to buy kelp meal (since it sounds like the Medinas is mostly kelp meal-based). But I don't think the Medinas is going to be enough on its own. I would still suggest you try to pick up a bag of dry organic fertilizer like the ones I mentioned (tomato tone or garden tone or plant tone, Dr. Earth tomato and veggie, Down to Earth all-purpose). I like these fertilizers because they contain a variety of amendments, which is what we're looking for. You can absolutely grow healthy plants using just kelp meal, but you would need high-quality homemade compost or ewc in addition.

Basically, I would use the Medinas as your kelp meal source (since it's mostly kelp meal) if it's cheaper to do that than to buy plain kelp meal, and then add another dry organic fertilizer. Or you could use the Medinas combined with some alfalfa meal and a little bone meal. Bottom line is that I think you should add a little extra something in addition to the Medinas.

They most likely aren't going to have rock dust at Home Depot. They may have glacial rock dust or azomite at your farm/feed store. The cheapest option is to source granite dust from a local stone cutting place or a place that sells mulch/topsoil/gravel. They will sell you granite dust for very cheap (or may even give you some). Just a note-soft rock phosphate is a P amendment, not a rock dust, so that's not what you want.

Happy Gardening!

 

Hey NOOB, glad you liked the thread! Thanks for checking it out!

 

Hey DDD, glad you stopped by!
I've actually got more amendments/products to add to the list, and guano is one of them. The guano/ewc slurry along with a kelp meal top-dress seemed to correct for the little issues that the girls were showing within a week or two. But I suspect that it had more to do with the ewc and kelp meal than it did the guano. In hindsight, I feel it would have been a better course of action for me to apply just an ewc slurry and kelp meal and see if that didn't do the trick.
(for anybody that's wondering, we're talking about combining a few spoonfuls of guano with a couple cups of ewc, moistening it, letting it sit for a little while, then using it as a top-dressing)

I don't know the exact break down time of guano, I will do some research on it and see what I come up with. I have conflicting feelings when it comes to guano, and my issues with it have more to do with sustainability than anything else. I've been trying to move my garden in a sustainable direction as much as possible-which means finding local nutrient sources to replace amendments that aren't available here or that I would have to have shipped in. Shipping stuff across the country or buying products produced halfway around the world just doesn't vibe well with my view of what organic gardening is all about. Not to mention that guano harvesting is destructive of natural ecosystems and harmful to bat populations.

I had the old bag of guano lying around, so I used it. In my opinion, it taking a long time to break down is not really a deterrent, since I reuse my soil over and over again. The nutrients in the guano will eventually become available to plants in future grows. But the long breakdown time is of concern when looking for a relatively quick fix to a problem. Plants don't need nearly as much phosphorus as fertilizer manufacturers would lead us to believe, and I'm really starting to think that a P deficiency in an organic soil is evidence of some other problem, not so much an absence of P. Also, high phosphorus concentrations are actually harmful to soil microbes, especially mycorrhizae fungi. I will do more research on this and post up what I find.

I have tried a guano top-dressing before, and the guano/ewc slurry did seem to be far more effective.