Don’t Forget to Fertilize!
One of the most common misconceptions we see with organic gardening is thinking that if you use good organic soil (like ours!), that you don’t need to fertilize. Or equating the negative connotations of synthetic fertilizers with natural fertilizers. Fertilizer is simply anything, including natural sources, that provide plants with macronutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium).
Even when you start with good soil and add compost, your plants — particularly heavy feeders like tomatoes — will eventually exhaust the macronutrients available. And you need to replenish them throughout the growing season to get blossoms on your flowers and a good yield from your vegetables. Adding micronutrients as well can help fend off disease and pests, increase nutrient uptake, develop robust root systems and more.
Chicken Litter Compost
Our chickens at Local Cooling Farms start their lives in deep litter bedding in brooders in our barn, move to a hoophouse barn as “teenagers” and finally move out to our pasture flock at 4-6 months old. While in the brooder and the hoophouse, we constantly layer fresh pine mulch bedding for the chickens to scratch and peck through and dust bathe in. They of course manure the area and through natural habits, scratch and turn the manure right into the bedding, and it begins composting through that process.
Once the chickens move out, we muck out the entire area and let it age and compost for additional months, then screen it to ¼ inch. This product therefore has the macronutrients of a manure fertilizer, along with the micronutrients of a compost product.
Worm Castings
Our worm casting are produced by feeding our red wigglers a special mix of organic matter that has gone through an initial stage of static pile composting. Screened to 1/4” and less, the finished worm manure is a wonderful amendment to add beneficial biology to any growing situation from house plants to vegetable beds. Full of beneficial microbes, worm castings should be used along your organic fertilizers to assist in nutrient uptake. Worm castings can be used during every life cycle of a plant from seed to fruiting.
We also offer:
An array of dry fertilizer mixes from FoxFarm’s Happy Frog line, including All Purpose, Citrus Avocado, Fruit & Flower and Tomato & Vegetable, as well as Neptune’s Harvest liquid fish emulsion and seaweed blends and amendments such as bone meal, blood meal, kelp meal, crab meal, green sand, soil acidifiers, garden lime and more.
