Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Not only time to plant seeds in the garden, but to take care of the garlic I planted last October. Garlic is a heavy feeder. I enriched the soil before I planted the garlic, and now that it's spring and the garlic is growing, it's time to give it some fertilizer. You will always see 3 numbers on a bag or bottle of fertilizer. The three numbers stand for N (nitrogen) P (phosphorus) and K (potassium). Always in that order. Garlic likes a high nitrogen fertilizer. I like to use a fish fertilizer. It's liquid concentrate, so you use 2 tablespoons per gallon of water. Not all fish fertilizers are equal though. So always look on the bottle for a high first number. Tomatoes for example, like a high phosphorus low nitrogen fertilizer. So you'd look for a high middle number and a low first number on the bag, for tomatoes. I feed my garlic about once a month till June. In this bed I have 2 different types of garlic. Music garlic on the left, and german red garlic on the right. Both came through the winter very nicely, with every clove I planted coming up. I planted a total of over 300 cloves of garlic last October, in 3 different gardens.

1 comment:

  1. I thought I had asked this question, but I can't find it ... I probably messed up the posting of it.

    I get confused on fertilizer as to what can be considered organic and what is chemical.

    You mention above the fertilizer by numbers, and this makes me think of a bag of fertilizer that I always thought was a chemical fertilizer ... NOT organic.

    What makes a fertilizer organic?

    --Robert

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