December Gardening Tips

December Gardening Article
by Neil DeWitt

This month I will discuss the topic of using organic fertilizers. Today organic” this-and that” seems to be the craze. No place should organic be more applicable than in one’s home garden. We have already taken a huge step towards providing our family with more healthy produce when we grow it ourselves, but when you do it without the use of commercial fertilizers you know for certainty that you are doing the best you can for your family and at the same time, helping to protect the environment.

Organic fertilizers differ from conventional chemical fertilizers in several ways. Of course they are organic as opposed to being chemical formulations, so when you buy a chemical fertilizer, that is pretty much all you get, while most organic fertilizers provide you with a smorgasbord of nutrients important to plants. Another difference between chemical and organic fertilizers is in how they feed plants. Chemical fertilizers are generally water-soluble, so plants can use the nutrients immediately. However, most organic fertilizers, in contrast, must be degraded by soil microorganisms before their nutrients become soluble and can be taken up by the plants’ roots. And this is a good thing because the same warmth and moisture that coaxes plants to grow also encourages those microorganisms to work. The result being, that organic fertilizer feeds plants in synch with plants’ needs. Another benefit to the fact that most organic fertilizers are at first insoluble is that rain or irrigation tends not to leach away the fertilizers’ nutrients quickly and thus they often will last an entire season.

And finally, a benefit to be had by utilizing organic fertilizers is that they are more environmentally responsible than using chemical fertilizers because the production of these commercial fertilizers usually require the use of petrochemicals for their manufacture. On the other hand, many organic fertilizers are simply byproducts or waste products. Recycling them is not only environmentally sound, by it also costs less, in fact, these are sometimes even “free” for the hauling!

Since most nutrients in organic fertilizers aren’t immediately available to feed your plants, you need to plan ahead when using them. The ideal time to apply organic fertilizers is between late fall and late winter. Thus, the timeliness of this topic falls into the timeframe of our December gardening article. If the organic fertilizer is applied during the winter months, all you have to do is sprinkle or scatter the matter on top of your garden’s soil and it’ll be ready for plants to use when they are planted or they awaken in the spring. There is no need to dig the fertilizer into the soil, thus saving on your labor. The one exception to this would be a fertilizer applied specifically to add phosphorus to your soil. It will need to be spaded into the soil because of the fact that phosphorus moves very slowly through soil and thus it won’t feed your plants’ roots which are usually one or two feet deep in the soil.

You can buy organic fertilizers that supply mostly one major nutrient, or you can buy a blend that supplies one or more of all three of the major nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. All organic fertilizers also offer micronutrients, which are just as important as the major nutrients, but are needed only in tiny amounts. Keep in mind that organic fertilizers do not address the need for adding additional organic matter such as compost, leaves, and other bulky natural materials to your soil to improve your soil aeration and water-holding capacity. Although these organic materials do, in fact, also help to release nutrients as they decompose, but they release it at such a low percentage that they are not rightly called fertilizers.

Here is a list of some commonly used organic fertilizers available at most garden centers:
Fertilizer Nitrogen % Phosphorus % Potassium % Fertilizer Nitrogen % Phosphorus % Potassium %
Alfalfa meal 3 3 2 Manure, cow 0.25 0.15 0.5
Guano 12 15 2 Manure, horse 0.3 0.15 0.5
Blood meal 15 1 1 Peat 2 0.3 0.8
Bone meal 4 20 0 Rock Phosphate 0 33 0
Compost 2 1 2 Seaweed 2 1 9
Fish emulsion 4 3 2 Cottonseed meal 7 2 2
Granite dust 0 0 5 Wood ashes 0 2 5
Greensand 0 1 6 Worm castings 1 0 0



TIP: Use soluble organic fertilizers such as fish emulsion or seaweed extract when your plants
need a fast acting fertilizer for an emergency feeding.
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Suffer Not a Weed: Remove weeds while they’re small. A mature weed that goes to seed can produce thousand of new weeds!