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How often do you recommend fertilizing?

#1

A

arslant001

Hi experts, can anyone suggest to me How often should I fertilize my plants?

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#2

StarTech

StarTech

Depends on a lot of factors. First are potted or in ground ones? I usually do my plants around the yard once or twice a year. A couple light applications are better for the plants as there is less of a chance of burning them.


#3

S

slomo

Do you have a yard that has dirt spots? Places where you are trying to get the grass to fill in? If so monthly with as much N, P and K as you can afford.

Are you just maintaining a healthy lawn? Once a month sounds good with a light app.

You can dump 46-0-0 on Bermuda WEEKLY and not have an issue. Other than that you will be mowing your butt off.


#4

sgkent

sgkent

hard to answer that question. Have you done any soil tests? Are they in ground or potted. Indoors or outside. How much does it rain there a year and when. Make a list of the plants and answer those questions, that would be a better way to get an accurate answer. If trees are involved are they fruit trees or shade? How large are the trunks in diameter?


#5

A

arslant001

StarTech said:
Depends on a lot of factors. First are potted or in ground ones? I usually do my plants around the yard once or twice a year. A couple light applications are better for the plants as there is less of a chance of burning them.
Click to expand...
Thank you so much for your suggestion.


#6

A

arslant001

sgkent said:
hard to answer that question. Have you done any soil tests? Are they in ground or potted. Indoors or outside. How much does it rain there a year and when. Make a list of the plants and answer those questions, that would be a better way to get an accurate answer. If trees are involved are they fruit trees or shade? How large are the trunks in diameter?
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No, I don't do any soil tests yet. They are on the ground outside. The state receives an average of 56 inches (1,400 mm) of rainfall each year.


#7

S

slomo

Best thing for ALL soils is/are beneficial microbes/bacteria I think they are called. They are tiny little guys that work IN the soil to make the soil grow items. They convert urea (nitrogen) into a plant usable source.

My story - Turf always struggles to grow grass. Hard clay soil, not much of a root system to grow grass. I would fertilize and the turf would look better for a few weeks then flop again. Struggle to fill in holes, spread and such.

Stumbled onto a product called Bio S.I. It puts living beneficial microbes/bacteria into the soil with a hose end sprayer.

Long story short, it was like I fertilized all year but did NOT. Grass started spreading and filling in, looking good and healthy. Saved an entire year of fertilizer cost, labor and more chemicals building up in my turf.

I would call the Bio SI guys and ask your own questions. Think they are out of Texas.

Bio S.I. Agricultural Formula

www.biositechnology.com www.biositechnology.com

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#8

Norma_G

Norma_G

arslant001 said:
Hi experts, can anyone suggest to me How often should I fertilize my plants?

​

Click to expand...
Where you live, the size of your lawn, the variety of plants you have, the time of year, and several other factors all play a part in determining how often to fertilize your plants. Generally, there are two types of fertilizer: Organic and Synthetic. Each type of fertilizer performs best under specific circumstances, and neither is ideal in every situation. Suppose you are going to apply fertilizer to plants. In that case, you must understand the proper application techniques. It is always good to consult a property maintenance team before making any major decisions, particularly regarding something as important as your lawn.


#9

sgkent

sgkent

do a soil test first. Then you will know what is needed. Soils vary, so do climates, so do grasses. This is my schedule in the Sacramento area per 1000 sq ft. You need to know what amounts of each mineral are needed. My schedule is based on the last soil test in mid-May. I use Waypoint Analytical in Memphis TN. About 20 a test and that includes N recommendations. Each number on the fertilizer is the percentage of that element per 100 lbs. So a 21-7-15 fertilizer is 21% Nitrogen, 7% Phosphorous, and 15% Potassium. Different fertilizers have different percentages of the element.

May 28, 5 lbs Yara 21-7-15 and 1 lb of potash
July 1 – done 5 lbs of Yara 21-7-15 and 1 lb 48% K prills. Equal to about 1 lb of N and 1 lb of K
August 15 - prefer soil test again about August 8.
September 15
October 15
December 1
January 15
March 1
April 15
May 15
repeat

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#10

bkeller500

bkeller500

slomo said:
Best thing for ALL soils is/are beneficial microbes/bacteria I think they are called. They are tiny little guys that work IN the soil to make the soil grow items. They convert urea (nitrogen) into a plant usable source.

My story - Turf always struggles to grow grass. Hard clay soil, not much of a root system to grow grass. I would fertilize and the turf would look better for a few weeks then flop again. Struggle to fill in holes, spread and such.

Stumbled onto a product called Bio S.I. It puts living beneficial microbes/bacteria into the soil with a hose end sprayer.

Long story short, it was like I fertilized all year but did NOT. Grass started spreading and filling in, looking good and healthy. Saved an entire year of fertilizer cost, labor and more chemicals building up in my turf.

I would call the Bio SI guys and ask your own questions. Think they are out of Texas.

Bio S.I. Agricultural Formula

www.biositechnology.com www.biositechnology.com

View attachment 60329
Click to expand...
I was just looking at this product ( BioS.I. ) last week but couldn't find many testimonials and couldn't find a application rate ( Oz / gal water / 1000 sf) . Can you share what your application rate is? My story is very similar to yours and I have about a acre to cover.


#11

S

slomo

bkeller500 said:
I was just looking at this product ( BioS.I. ) last week but couldn't find many testimonials and couldn't find a application rate ( Oz / gal water / 1000 sf) . Can you share what your application rate is? My story is very similar to yours and I have about a acre to cover.
Click to expand...
I found it to do similar to compost. You can't dig up your entire yard and mix compost in. Anyway it's simple to apply. The app rate is on the bottle. You can call them direct and get the app rate too. Doesn't cost anything.

I applied it ONCE to my yard. That season it turned around like a normal yard. My hard clay soil with basically no root system responded. Put in an irrigation system. Looked for the roots. Not much there in the trenches OMG.

I found it looking for something to bust up clay soil. Turns out we need to feed the beneficial bacteria with sugar a couple times a year to keep them growing and healthy. I never did that. No wonder my concrete lawn struggled all the time.

That old school guy that used ammonia for nitrogen, corn syrup (sugar) to feed the beneficial organisms, dish soap as a surfactant and such. I have his book at home. You put all those items in a hose end sprayer. Jerry Baker was his name.



#12

sgkent

sgkent

Bakers solutions did nothing for my plants and lawn. I hired someone who did this stuff for a living then started studying what I could thru University AG white papers. You need to feed the micro-organisms in the soil. Also never let clay completely dry out. The product below is full of humates and humic acid. Those are the compounds that decomposing materials put into the soil that transports the nutrients to the roots. This product is a short cut to building soil. Bacteria simply free up the nutrients. That said, if you haven't done a soil test you stand a good chance of destroying your soil for the rest of your life time if you start guessing what it needs. Especially on clay.

www.groworganic.com

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag) for sale

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag).Derived from Leonardite shale and a natural source of humic substances and trace minerals.
www.groworganic.com www.groworganic.com


#13

S

slomo

sgkent said:
Bakers solutions did nothing for my plants and lawn. I hired someone who did this stuff for a living then started studying what I could thru University AG white papers. You need to feed the micro-organisms in the soil. Also never let clay completely dry out. The product below is full of humates and humic acid. Those are the compounds that decomposing materials put into the soil that transports the nutrients to the roots. This product is a short cut to building soil. Bacteria simply free up the nutrients. That said, if you haven't done a soil test you stand a good chance of destroying your soil for the rest of your life time if you start guessing what it needs. Especially on clay.

www.groworganic.com

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag) for sale

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag).Derived from Leonardite shale and a natural source of humic substances and trace minerals.
www.groworganic.com www.groworganic.com
Click to expand...
Guess I love destroying my dead soil. Having to not fertilize for the entire season paid for the Bio SI product.

Sure there are other magic tricks one can do. I use Anderson's Humic DG.

Best thing I've found was rich mix top soil with compost. Every place we spreaded it out completely turned around. We had baseball bat sized okra plant trunks that season. Okra was 10+ feet tall. All the low spots in the yard greened up strongly. Compost for the win.


#14

1

1 Lucky Texan

plants get very little permanent mass from the soil. They are made of water and carbon from the air. That's why trees aren't sitting in a hole. But they do need trace elements/coumpounds from the soil, some of which could be depleted from past use/abuse of the land, and some slow-release fertilizer once in a while can help. Certain kinds can also stimulate blooming or w'ever.


#15

B

bertsmobile1

For heavy clay soils getting a good biome is difficult
It will take some time
start with gypsum clay breaker
The best way to do this is to apply then run a plug airator over the grass, the type that makes a hole about 1" or so deep then pulls the plug of ground out .
All living organism require food air & water and that includes the micro biome in the soil
Soil if further complicated by the fact that it can be acid or alkaline and that can make the food unavailable to the plants .
After the gypsum, next season apply a sandy top dressing with lots of charcoal dust in the same way
Water that in with a dilute solution of micro nutrients
Following season more gypsum
then the sand & charcoal
As you can see this is a slow process
The grass clippings should provide most of the food for bacteria .
Fine ground cow manure will also help and not be as smelly as chook poo.
And as already metioned never ever let it dry and try not to flood it either .
If the soil is saturated then there is no air
If the soil is dry there is no water

Adding bacteria that need feeding with a sugar solution is not a good idea .
You need bacteria that can live in your lawn without adding unatural supluments and thrive on what is there
Seeding with fresh compost is best and better still if you make it yourself and allow it to rot down to dust which can take a couple of years .
Dilute urine is really good food for grass .
In nature grasses are fed by the urine & poo from the animals that were feasting on them.
Humans got carried away with the chemistry post WWII so we entered the days of seed + chemical fertalizer = food and just about destroyed the soil doing this .
Now we know that soil is alive and keeping it healthy will make healthy plants with minimal need for fertalizers , most of which end up polluting waterways


#16

7394

7394

milorganite​



#17

S

slomo

7394 said:

milorganite​

Click to expand...
Is the worst waste of money you can use. Very expensive for just 5% nitrogen only. That is hardly adding anything to the turf for all that cash. No P or K from it either. No micro minerals.... Read the label. Then ask where's the rest??

Using Milo on my lawn costs 2-3 times more than any other out there. Results, can't tell I put down anything. Starter ferts with slow release nitro are much better.

You must have fescue or some shade grass that doesn't need any nitro and such.


#18

sgkent

sgkent

start with gypsum clay breaker
Click to expand...
that only works on certain sodic (high sodium) clays. But on the clays it does work on, it is the best solution to break up the clay. On non-sodic clays it does nothing but add calcium and sulfur, make the soil slightly more acidic. We are on clay here, almost adobe. I am now a 30 year expert on dealing with it.

That said, the greatest example of what soil biome is, dig a trench in clay to say put an irrigation pipe or cable in. Then back fill. If the soil on top, is not the top soil, you will have a sterile line for 2 - 3 years where nothing grows unless you dress the last inch or so with some kind of top soil. This was clay adobe hard as concrete in summer 30 years ago. Today the soil is black and grows well as long as it is kept covered in summer when it is 110F here. Which it was the other day. I coat with rice hay because it has less seed in it. Without the rice hay the plant roots overheat. This garden was planted essentially 5/1/2022. The soil was too cold before that because this is on the N side of the house.

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#19

B

bertsmobile1

Yes all the action happens in the top couple of inches because the bacteria need air
Turning the soil as was commonly done decades ago actually kills the soil so the conservation based farmers went to slit plowing & thin ripping
Then the next big advancement was the understanding of fungi which can penetrate hard clay . just so long as it is wet and can stretch for well over a mile around an individual plant .
Thus the advice to use a plug airator which does the least harm to the bacteria & mycorrhizal network .
Despite living in Sydney Australia all my life which actually has predominantly clay soils, clay is something I have rarely had to deal with, as all the places I lived had deep soil over a clay pan so overwatering has always been the biggest problem.
The exception to this was the house in Springwood in the Blue Mountains where all of the top soil had washed down into the valleys so that was a slow process of just adding a lot of compost & heavy mulching with a lot of coarse river sand to make some top soil remembering that as best you can all of the mulch & compost has to be made from local vegetation so it provide habitat for the local biosphere
This is how I got onto charcoal which by & large is the best thing you can add to any soil as it holds both air & water
I make my own compost and my own charcoal .
However do not be fooled by all of the bio-char BS on the web
If you put the same amount of fertilizers on airated soil , pearlite, mica or ground scoria that they put into the "miricle" bio-char the plants would grow almost exactly the same
I find it very dissapointing that every one seems to expect to get overnight results when working with a very complex environment that they do not understand which has taken centuries to evolve .
Thanks for the heads up on gypsum.
It obviously works down here because it is suited to our clays & I had undersood that it was universal


#20

7394

7394

slomo said:
You must have fescue or some shade grass that doesn't need any nitro and such.
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Yes I do have lush Fescue & it works great on mine.


#21

C

Carl.Cook

sgkent said:
hard to answer that question. Have you done any soil tests? Are they in ground or potted. Indoors or outside. How much does it rain there a year and when. Make a list of the plants and answer those questions, that would be a better way to get an accurate answer. If trees are involved are they fruit trees or shade? How large are the trunks in diameter?
Click to expand...
You nailed it! Soil testing ensures the correct mixture is applied, if need at all. Fertilizing without soil testing is like adding a quart of oil to you vehicle every week without checking the level first, simply because your last vehicle used a quart every week.


#22

sgkent

sgkent

plants tolerate a certain chemistry in the soil. Different plants tolerate different chemistries. The danger of guessing what one needs, without a soil test, is that some minerals do not easily wash out of soil. Hence, adding something over and over that worked three years ago may become toxic. There are years where my soil is so balanced, all I need to do is add a little nitrogen. Other years I need something else. ALSO and this is a big also, as the soil acidity and alkalinity change, certain minerals become more or less available. If any of you remember the acid rains of the 70's and dying forests, it was because the acid in the rain from the power plant effluents caused the soil to become acidic. As that happened heavy metals that were locked in the soil became available and killed the trees. I once bought some supposed to be really good soil from a nursery supply. Like yards of it for a side fence area with camellias. Turned out there was too much manure in it and lime, and it almost killed the plants. That was 15 years ago, and I still have not been able to get the pH back to acidic in spite of all the fertilizer and sulfur that has been used on it. It started like 8.2 pH and is now down to about 7.0 which is neutral. Camellias like acidic soil, like 5.8 to 6.5 or so. Fortunately a soil test saved my plants because we immediately did some things to bring the pH down. I dug around each plant and added a huge amount of peat to the soil. So when I suggest getting a soil test first, trust me - that is how big farms have such nice crops and you struggle with them. They test the soil so only what is needed is added. $20 a test. Really inexpensive compared to a bag of fertilizer you don't need.


#23

B

bertsmobile1

Depends upon how well you know what you are growing .
Plants will tell you what they need or what they are getting too much of
Hydrangers grow relatively well around here so they are my pH indicators
Just about every plot has one or two of them trimmed back as low as possible each season because the hot summer days burn them badly .
The only fertilizer as such I apply is on the veggies & pumpkins and they get cow pats or a spray made from worm wee and of course the citrus which gets me wee .
Other than that the compost has chook, cow, horse & alpaca poo in it , fresh & dry grass clippings + what ever has been pruned run through the shredder .
I wet it down when necessary with dilute urine &/or dilute worm wee or the effluent from a weed bin full of water that nasty weeds go into to rot down anerobically
Compost goes on between every crop & then 6" of dry grass from the paddocks or as a mulch or pine needles for the acid lovers like tomatoes
Adding the charcoal to the compost I found made it a lot more effective but I will attribute that to it adsorbing the nutrients that are usually leeched out when watering.
Minimal watering via dripers also seemed to make a big difference as well and that water is from a tank, not the mains which are chlorinated & flouridated .


#24

sgkent

sgkent

Hydrangeas are a partial shade plant. As for speaking with plants, maybe after enough beers you can hear them speak. What language they speak in I do not know.


#25

E

Erin0110

At least 5-6 times per year.


#26

J

jankihaii3

Best thing for ALL soils is/are beneficial microbes/bacteria I think they are called. They are tiny little guys that work IN the soil to make the soil grow items. They convert urea (nitrogen) into a plant usable source.


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