Published July 8th, 2014
Have you ever heard of “side dressing” vegetables? It’s just a fancy way of saying that plants need quite a bit of food when they’re growing rapidly, and you need to be thinking about fertilizing them right about now. The term “side dressing” means applying plant food to the ground around the plant without getting any fertilizer on the plant itself and perhaps burning it.
The best way to fertilize is to mix the fertilizer with the soil when you first plant. This has a “timed-release” effect because the roots find the food as the plant grows, which helps the roots spread quickly. But rapidly growing plants quickly use up the fertilizer in their root zone, and eventually the root system stops expanding. Now it’s time to perk them up with some more food.
A great way to side-dress during the season is to mulch your garden with mushroom compost. Good mushroom compost is sterile so it suppresses weeds while adding much-needed nitrogen in a gentle way. Mushroom compost is a great soil builder as well.
In our own gardens we use organic powdered plant foods like Garden Tone, Plant Tone, Rose Tone and Bulb Tone by Espoma Organics. These are balanced meals containing lots of wholesome natural ingredients like gypsum, greensand and bone meal, and they’re mild so they won’t burn your plants. Espoma Organics is a modern version of the old-fashioned fertilizer mill; a factory where ground-up natural ingredients are blended into powdered fertilizers that build and replenish tired soils. We call Espoma fertilizers the “magic dust”. They contain soil micro-organisms that help your plants digest fertilizer and trace minerals.
Side-dressing with sustained-release organic fertilizers gives plants a boost while they are actively growing. Simply sprinkle fertilizer on the ground in the root zone and water it in. This replaces the nutrients that the plants have already used, stimulating bloom and fruiting at a key time. Plants are switching gears right now, storing nutrients and setting fruit. You’ll be amazed how a timely fertilizer application will improve your harvest.
It’s important for the plants to be completely dry before applying powdered fertilizers, because moisture can cause the plant food to cling to stems and leaves, burning them. It’s a good idea to water your garden after side-dressing, washing off fertilizer dust and helping the fertilizer reach the plant roots.
Liquid fertilizers are useful for fertilizing hanging baskets, window boxes and planters where potting soil is used and roots are confined in a small pot. Professional growers use a weak solution of fertilizer in their irrigation water to encourage rapid growth. Rather than using Miracle Gro, we prefer liquid fish emulsions like Neptune’s Harvest, made just for this. You can water it in or spray it on the leaves, and it will perk plants up quickly.