What do bat guano greensand gypsum and bone meal all have in
common? Well, they are organic amendments that you can add to your garden.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a
greener thumb. And on this table here,
I have a ton of the most popular organic fertilizers to add into your garden.
But I fully realize that there's a bunch of them and what do they all mean?
How do you know which one to use? And so that's why in this video,
I'm going to break down every single one of these,
what they're made of what their NPK ratio is and what you should use them for
and maybe even what you shouldn't use them for. So cultivate that like button,
and I will personally bless you with 1% more organic matter in your garden right
now and let's get into the video.
Organic fertilizer number one is none other than alfalfa meal.
This one's really fantastic. It's relatively inexpensive.
As the name would imply, it's just ground up alfalfa,
which is often used as a cover crop or as feed for livestock.
This one will break down a lot quicker because again, it is ground up.
It's a two zero two. So for those of you who don't know an NPK ratio,
there's nitrogen phosphorus and potassium.
So this particular one is two zero two,
meaning 2% nitrogen, 0% phosphorous and 2% potassium.
So it's a good early spring fertilization.
A lot of the times what you would do if winter is starting to end,
the soil is getting a little bit more workable.
You can sprinkle some of this into your bed as per the instructions.
And it's going to be a great way to just slightly boost the organic matter and
the nutrient quality in the soil. Next up is cottonseed meal.
If you are someone who doesn't want to use an animal product based fertilizer,
both alfalfa meal and cottonseed meal are fantastic options for you.
This one in particular is produced from the waste stream that comes out of
cottonseed oil production.
So it's a repurposed - what would effectively be just a landfill or commercially
composted product, which is really great for us. We get to reuse that,
but why is it actually good for the garden? Well,
the NPK ratio let's break it down. It's a six two one, 6% nitrogen,
2% of phosphorus and 1% potassium that stands to reason that you may
want to apply that in the fall.
Cottonseed meal also does have a little bit of a weed suppressant effect.
And so it can be really nice to put in the fall,
let that nitrogen really become bioavailable and suppress those weeds.
Or you could throw down a bunch of the cottonseed meal in a cover crop in the
fall on your raised beds or your in ground plantings. And then boom,
when the time comes for spring,
like it is right now at the time of releasing this video,
then it will be all ready to go and worked into your soil.
One of the weirder organic fertilizers that you'll often see is bat guano.
So that is none other than just bat feces or bat poop that is collected,
and then packaged up. In fact, this one from Espoma,
I'm gonna read the back cause it's actually kind of interesting.
It says is derived from wild insects,
eating bats and procured from a unique cave environment in the Southwestern USA.
What's really cool about bat guano is it's a fantastic fertilizer.
It's a ten three, one, so really high on the nitrogen,
but also has a lot of trace minerals that will be very beneficial for your
plants. Things like calcium, that sort of thing. Now, if you're going to use it,
it's a relatively faster-acting organic fertilizer.
So you can use it as a top dress while your plants are growing.
Or let's say spring is over. You're pulling your crops out,
harvesting it up and you want to refresh the bed.
You can toss some of this in here, especially if you know,
the plant that you're putting in is going to need a lot of nitrogen because a 10
3 1 is really high on that nitrogen level.
A final thing you can do with bat guano is actually steep it,
turn it into a compost tea type of approach,
and then spray that on your plants as a foliar spray.
Next up for someone who's coastal like myself,
this one of course is near and dear to my heart. This is kelp meal.
This is actually something that you could go out and harvest and process into
your own organic fertilizer.
If you want to do that option is completely available to you.
I think as long as you have a fishing license,
you can actually just go out and harvest maybe like 10 pounds a day or something
like that. But why is kelp meal good? Well,
kelp is one of the fastest growing plants on earth and actually has a ton of
trace minerals.
It's really not super high in the three main macronutrients NPK.
It's a one zero two,
but there are so many trace minerals in it that I find it's one of my most
used organic amendments,
because I just want to make sure that I'm not low on any of those.
So with kelp meal,
what I'll typically do is I'll take a cup measuring cup and just spread it out
and broadcast it into the garden. You can't really overdo it. Like I said,
it's very low on NPK,
but relatively high in trace minerals and trace mineral breadth.
There's a lot of them in there. So it's a fantastic one to have in your arsenal.
Next up, here's one that you probably hear a lot about,
but you might be confused on how to use it and that would be rock phosphate,
interesting name.
It's basically just a natural mineral that typically is pelletized. And so it's,
instead of just being a bunch of dust,
you've got these little pellets that help just make it easier to spread into the
garden.
But what's so interesting about it is it's a zero three zero up to about a zero
five zero, meaning that there's nothing in it besides phosphorus,
which typically soils aren't very low in. And so I would say unless, you know,
for sure that you have a phosphorus issue in your soil,
there's not a huge reason to use a ton of rock phosphate. I mean,
you could sprinkle some here and there, but I wouldn't go overboard with it.
The other thing to remember is that it still needs to be broken down by the
inherent life within the soil to make that phosphorus available to the plants.
And so if you're just dumping this into relatively lifeless soil,
it's really almost like you did nothing at all. So number one,
make sure you have a phosphorus deficiency before you use a lot of it.
And number two, make sure you're cultivating a really healthy soil.
So it actually does break down and become available.
Our next amendment is one of the more interesting ones on the list.
It's called greensand. What's crazy about it, number one,
it sounds like it's an ingredient in like a spell or potion that you might be
casting, but number two,
it can do a lot that other amendments seem not to be able to do. First of all,
what is it? Well, it's a mined natural mineral called glauconite,
which is primarily composed of an iron potassium silicate.
What means for the organic garden is that it's going to have some iron and
potassium for your garden, both things that your plants will need,
especially when they're broken down of course,
and becoming bioavailable to the plant.
But another crazy thing about greensand is that if you're,
let's say you're in Florida and you have really sandy soil,
it can help bind that sandy soil together. If you're in my area, for example,
and have relatively clay soil, it can actually help loosen that clay soil.
So it does the exact opposite based on the soil conditions that you're dealing
with. And it will increase the water-holding capacity of all soils.
And so as a soil conditioner alone, it's a pretty good amendment.
And then of course it does have some nutrients that eventually will break down
and make their way into the soil. Next up is garden gypsum.
This one is confusing for a lot of people myself included at the beginning
because you know, you hear a lot of things about it, like, oh,
just add it to any sort of heavy soil and it will loosen it up. Well,
there's a couple of conditions that you need to have for the gypsum to have
maximum effect. Number one, you have to have a relatively heavy clay soil.
I actually do have that. So maybe that would work for me. Number two,
you want to have,
what's called a sodic soil or soil that is relatively high in salts.
That is the perfect use case for gypsum,
because what it'll do is it will loosen up heavy soil and it will actually take
salt out of the soil and replace it with calcium.
So if you have clay soil that is high in salt and low in calcium,
this could be a perfect application for you.
I will say most soils in our gardens here, you know, backyards,
front yards typically tend not to really need it too much.
What you can do is make sure you get a soil test, get a composition test.
It's one of the most useful things you can do in your organic garden.
I swear it sounds nerdy. It sounds dumb,
but if you get a soil test from a university or a local nursery,
you'll know if you need gypsum or not. Next up, we have garden lime.
This one is really highly recommended to take an acidic soil and raise the
pH. So quick little pH lesson seven is your pH neutral.
Below that is an acidic soil and above that is an alkaline
soil. Most of our vegetables,
they want a pH somewhere around 6.5 ish or so.
And so if you're too far below that,
then you can lock out some nutrients and your plants will struggle.
So what will be recommended is that you add some lime to your soil to alkalize
it or to raise the pH upwards. Now will this work, certainly it will work.
But the thing that you need to remember is soil has the ability to buffer
itself. So there will be a certain point which nothing will happen.
You put lime in the soil, buffers itself, it's completely fine.
If you break past that level, by adding a ton of lime,
then the pH will actually shoot up in your soil.
So a lot of the times it's not as needed as one might think,
and it's certainly not needed unless, you know,
you have a pH that is too low for the things that you're trying to grow.
So again, it comes back to knowing the qualities of your soil, get a soil test,
figure out what the pH is. And if you know, it's too low,
then consider adding some garden lime. Next up, we have two animal fertilizers.
This one is blood meal, and this one is bone meal.
So both of these are highly skewed as far as their NPK ratio.
And there's some interesting qualities about them.
So blood meal is dried up blood and then it's ground and powderized.
It is extremely high in nitrogen almost to the exclusion of anything else.
This particular one is a twelve zero, zero,
it's relatively fast acting and it's slightly acidic.
So you kind of want to be careful about directly applying a ton of it to your
garden, but it's certainly good to sprinkle in,
or it's also good to amend before you plant giving it about a month or two to
kind of work its way into the soil.
Another thing you could do with blood meal and with bone meal,
because both of them,
you kind of want them to break down a little bit before you really just plant
directly in bone meal is a four twelve zero.
So if you've got a twelve zero zero and a four twelve zero,
you've got a ton of nitrogen and phosphorus, not a lot of potassium,
but you still got a ton of the first two macronutrients is you can take all your
containers or your raised beds at the end of a season and mix this in,
let it sit over the winter time and by the time that early spring comes,
they should be a little bit more bioavailable at that point.
And with the blood meal,
it won't be as hot or acidic and won't have a potentially negative
effect on your plants. Now let's talk about poop.
I'm talking about animal poops or manures that you can use,
and there's a lot of different ones out there.
So we'll start out with a very common one, which would be cow manure.
Cow manure is roughly a two, one, three or so to really,
to kind of depends on the source that you're getting it from,
but all manures have a high mass to nutrient ratio.
So you're going to have a lot of product,
a lot of actual matter and relatively low nutrient quality compared to some of
the stuff that we've just talked about. Cow manure is fantastic.
You just want to make sure you're getting it from a source that you trust,
you know,
the way those cows were raised and you know that they're not using any sort of
weird pharmaceuticals or anything odd that you really don't want making its way
through the cow and then of course, making it into your garden.
Cow manure is a moderate speed manure,
which means that it's not super fast acting, but it's not extremely slow either.
It's right in that middle range.
Now there's another type of manure that I think is probably a little more
common,
especially if you're in the homesteading world and you're keeping chickens.
Chicken manure is one of the better sources is out there for
your garden. The trick with chicken manure is that it's higher in nitrogen.
So it's maybe like a three, one two somewhere in that range,
but it's also quite hot. It's what we call a hot manure.
It has the potential to cause nutrient burn on your plants.
And so what you can do is if you're keeping chickens or you're purchasing
chicken manure,
you want to make sure that it's actually composted down a little bit more.
It's actually rotted out and it's broken down.
So it's a little bit on that slower side. Cause if you take, you know,
scoops and scoops of chicken manure directly from a coop or your friend's coop
and dump it on your plants, they're probably not going to have a good time.
It's not the best application.
So if you're going to that use fresh chicken manure,
then use it on beds that you're preparing for later on down the road,
there's a type of manure that comes from a very small animal that we don't think
of as manure. And that would be earthworms.
Earthworm castings are some of my favorite things to add. Number one,
I do a lot of worm composting myself, but number two, it's a quick recycle.
So I can take my food scraps and shredded paper,
turn it directly into worm castings.
And those worm castings can go right out into my garden.
This is another one where the nutrient profile is very light sometimes even
under one. So like a 0.5 0.7 0.1. I mean, it really, again,
depends on the way that you're feeding your worms,
but there's tons of biological activity in earthworm castings,
especially when used fresh. So I'm very liberal with these.
I'll take scoops and scoops out of my Urban Worm Bag and I will toss them
directly into the garden. I'll sprinkle them into my pathways. Basically.
I can't get enough of it.
I'll just use as much as I possibly can and it works perfectly fine.
Another animal based product that you may want to consider,
especially if you eat fish is a fish emulsion.
So you can actually grind up the carcasses of the fish and use them as a
fertilizer. You can bury them directly in the soil. In fact,
my friend Mark over at Self-Sufficient Me did a fantastic video where he just
buried fish in the soil and grew tomatoes over them.
And he measured their progress, I think it's a highly interesting video.
So go check it out, but you can either DIY this,
or you can buy a prepared product.
The NPK ratio really does vary from like a two four zero to a five two zero.
So it's kind of all over the map, but you know,
this is a tried and true practice.
Indigenous Americans do used fish as fertilizer for many, many,
many generations to great effect and actually pioneered a lot of the techniques
that we've used in organic gardening for many decades now.
So it's a fantastic one. I encourage you to experiment with fish.
There's a lot in the world of organic fertilizers.
I would say use the ones that make the most sense for the use case you're trying
to get to in the garden,
whether it's to amend a bed it's to add some nitrogen it's to add some long-term
trace minerals,
there's a lot of different use cases and use the ones that make sense for you.
What maybe you can get locally. Of course, I love Espoma's products.
They sponsored the video. We've been using them for about two,
three years now and absolutely love them as you can see,
but there's a lot of different ways to get fertilizers,
including you making your own.
So hopefully this helped good luck in the garden and keep on growing.