So today ive noticed my plants are starting to get a bit yellow in the leaves ( now 2 weeks flowering) and I decided it wouldnt hurt to add some nutrients. I went to the store with the intention of getting some kelp or alfalfa meal to add to a nice compost tea and for top dressing. As this is a guerilla grow im wary of using bone meal for fear of coyotes or racoons digging my plants up. However the department store I went to had didnt have either and seeing as its the only place nearby that carries gardening supplies I started looking for an alternative. The only thing i found that looked halfway decent were these Jobes brand organic vegetable fertilizer spikes. They are 2-7-4 and OMRI certified. However im afraid that some roots would get blasted with this stuff and potentially burn while others got little or nothing? Maybe i could crush it up and use it as a top dressing? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
i dont know about those man, i think theyre shit. have u tried looking at feed/farm supply stores for amendments? amazon works like a charm too. i live in a huge metropolitan city and i order most of my shit anyway.
I take this concept and do my own spikes for flowering. I take a bamboo pole a thick one preferably and poke down through the soil in four spots near the edge of your pot. Then fill with a 50/50 kelp meal and bone meal mix. I add a few extras like high p bat shit and dio earth but you don't have to. Works great and gives an awesome boost to your flowering plants especially when teas are being used.
munchyman420 where do you live? state/providence would be fine. are the plants in the ground, and not in pots? you could be giving your plants the completely wrong nutrients with those spikes. for example, my clay like soil (in northeast ohio) came from a glacier thousands and thousands of years ago, and it is PACKED with phosphorus and potassium. like literally, if you dig a hole around here, throw some peat in it, and let it go, the only thing you would need to supplement would be nitrogen. the un-touched clay soil in my region is unbelievable. so, for my outdoor plants, i topdressed the shit out of them with composted manure & lobster compost. the sizes of the trunks on my plants is out of control...one of my plants is now about 9 feet tall, too! super green leaves, decent buds on one, some starting to form on another. when planting into a clay soil that has been used by another form of agriculture than you will need to supplement alot. when planting into an undisturbed clay soil, the only thing you really are going to need is nitrogen. let your roots spread out and find the rest.
I live in western washington state, my soil is sandy mountain soil and as far as i can tell is pretty nutrient poor. I did add a lot of compost (about 40%) plus perlite and lava chips (about 20%) and black gold organic soil ( peat moss, perlite and a miniscule amount of worm castings) which makes up another 20%, the rest is native soil which is very , very sandy. I have 5 smaller ak 47's in black gold (70%) and the rest compost, but those are not showing any defiencies. For my larger lavender plant ( used to be 2) i want to give it something. I have a feed store about 10 miles from me that im going to check out tomorrow, hopefully they will have kelp and alfalfa meal. I did take one of those spikes and drop it into a quart of water last night and it dissolved completely so im wondering if i could either add it to a compost tea or just dissolve it water and add that seperately for more even distribution? The ingredients in it are : feather meal, bone meal and sulfate of potash. I also added a couple to each of my tomato plants in my backyard last night, which appear to be doing fine as of now.
for a faster acting source of phosphorus, you can add jamaican bat guano as a topdress. it can be strong and has the potential to burn smaller plants, so be careful. at this point in time in the outdoor season, i would use a small amount of the alfalfa meal and mostly kelp for a tea. comfrey would be a great addition to a tea, but im not sure if it is available in your area (or if your willing to buy some offline). as for the jobes, judging by the picture i see on google, i wouldnt use it. it looks as if the "sticks" are a product of the mixture between organic amendments & chemicals. OMRI listings dont really mean a whole lot, unfortunately. for example, here is the pdf of an OMRI certified product, Maxicrop. look underneath the "category" right in the middle of the page. enough said. again, i wouldnt feed it to my plants. you are the god of your garden, so you make the call on what you would like to do.