“Gardening costs a lot of money.” You’ve probably heard this myth before or might even believe it yourself. Sometime in the past few decades, people started believing they had to make a significant investment to buy all of the fertilizer and supplies needed to plan a garden.
It removes the need for store-bought fertilizer. And a natural fertilizer will ensure your plants stay healthy and uncontaminated by unnatural products commonly found in mass-produced fertilizer.
Before you try any fertilizers on your whole garden, test it on a few plants first. Every soil, plant, and garden has different needs and deficiencies, and as a result, will react better to different types of fertilizer.
How To Correctly Fertilize All Your Plants
If one of your gardening goals is to avoid chemicals you're in the right place. Use these seven easy natural fertilizer recipes to make your own homemade plant food and give your backyard garden that extra boost.
These seven natural fertilizers represent just some of the total amount of fertilizers you can make at home or find for free. Cost should never be an excuse not to garden, so start getting creative and use these recipes to make your own ultimate plant food.
And before I forget, if you're looking for inexpensive planters, try making your own DIY planters for indoors or outdoors with these fun upcycling ideas!
Making Homemade Liquid Fertilizers
By combining some inexpensive and common household products, you can make a natural fertilizer that gives your plants all of the nutrients they need. And this is a great solution to try if you're trying to save money off the grid.
Epsom salt contains high levels of magnesium and sulfur, which plants need to create healthy foliage and absorb nutrients from the soil.
Baking soda helps plants bloom and protects them from fungal disease, while ammonia contains nitrogen to assist in growing a healthy root system.
How To Make Your Own Fertilizer
These three simple ingredients conveniently contain most of the nutrients needed to grow a healthy plant, and you most likely have them in your homestead kitchen or around the house. If not, they cost just a few dollars and can be found at most grocery or superstores.
Well, it turns out plants need potassium to grow just as much as we do. If you’re anything like our family, you probably go through quite a few bananas every week.
Save your banana peels (if you don’t already compost) and bury them in a hole a few inches below the surface next to plants like rose bushes or other plants that require high levels of potassium. You can even do this with overripe bananas if you don’t feel like making banana bread!
Plant Based Diet Recipes
If you want to take it a step further, steep the bananas in water similar to the seaweed tea process. Once the mixture has steeped long enough, use the water AND the peels to add some natural fertilizer to your garden.
The original and most effective natural fertilizer available: animal manure. Our ancestors have been using animal manure as a homemade (or animal made) plant food ever since humans began farming.
It obviously comes with no cost, other than the cost of owning and feeding animals. But you would be paying for those costs anyway, people don’t own animals just to make compost!
Homemade Rose Fertilizer Recipes For Best Flowers
Keep in mind, you need to dry and age the manure for about 6 months before adding it to your garden. Also, don’t use the waste from any household pets or meat-eating animals, as these may contain harmful parasites and bacteria.
If you have an aquarium or fishbowl that you clean every few weeks, save the water to use in your garden. As you know, aquarium water will get cloudy, smelly, and dirty over time due to fish waste.
This same waste is what makes aquarium water so good for your plants, adding natural fertilizer and nutrients to your soil. The aquarium water also has a high level of nitrogen, one of the most vital nutrients for healthy plants.
Make This Super Easy Diy Compost Bin In A Flash
Before you try any of these fertilizers on your whole garden, test it on a few plants first. Every soil, plant, and garden has different needs and deficiencies, and as a result, will react better to different types of fertilizer. By testing out your homemade plant food first, you will be able to find which one works best for your situation.
We've listed compost tea separately from regular compost because it can be used on its own, and gives apartment homesteaders an easy option if you have limited space. Here's how to make compost tea.
Organic matter contains incredibly high amounts of nitrogen, potassium, and other essential nutrients needed in your garden. Save these nutrients rather than throwing them out. When you have food scraps or any organic waste, add it to your compost pile.
How To Make Your Own Fresh Cut Flower Food
The nutrients found in expensive store-bought fertilizer will be similar (if not less) than the levels of nutrients in your own compost, so why would you pay for something you already have at home?
When we moved off the grid to Canada's subarctic, we had to learn how to garden in a cold climate. And in an area with 20+ hours of sunlight each summer!
Blake is Sarita's son, and an avid outdoorsman. He enjoys back-country hiking, camping, and honing his wilderness survival skills. Look for Blake's posts on hunting, fishing, homesteading, foraging, and food.Did you know plants can get hangry too? A “hangry” (hungry and angry) plant can start to die because it lacks the proper nutrients it needs to live. Plants use the nutrients in the soil to feed themselves and stay healthy. Over time, the plant’s soil eventually needs plant food to replenish the depleted nutrients.
Best Homemade Tomato Fertilizers For Every Growth Stage
Store-bought plant food can vary in price and tends to have filler ingredients and chemicals that aren’t the best for you or your plants. Homemade plant food is an easy and inexpensive way to feed your potted plants without accidentally harming your houseplants or breaking the bank.
Lots of common household items have the properties needed to replenish the nutrients in your plant’s soil, so you can create natural plant food in the comfort of your own home. We identified a few remedies to try out to create your own DIY plant food.
The chemical elements in household items are important to keep in mind. The most important elements are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. These elements are in store bought plant and measured by the “NPK” balance with each letter referring to its symbol on the periodic table (“N” referring to nitrogen, “P” referring to phosphorous and “K” referring to potassium). Each element helps productivity in different processes in the plant. Some other important elements to keep in mind include magnesium and calcium. Test a small portion of your plant soil first to make sure it will not harm any plants.
How To Make Organic Plant Fertilizer At Home
Now that you know all the important elements your plants need to survive it’s time to put them to the test by creating your own homemade plant food recipe.
An old plastic milk jug serves as a good container for this recipe. Add all of these ingredients to your container and let it sit for about half an hour. This gives your solid ingredients time to dissolve.
Add plant food directly to the soil so that the plant’s roots can best absorb the nutrients. Start by lightly topping your soil once a month and adjust how often you feed your plants based on how they respond.
The Creative Kitchen: Seasonal Plant Based Recipes For Meals, Drinks, Garden & Self Care: Seasonal Plant Based Recipes For Meals, Drinks, Garden And Self Care: Amazon.co.uk: Stephanie Hafferty: 9781856233231: Books
Plants show us what they’re hungry for based on their appearance. Yellow leaves and stunted growth are a couple ways our plants try to tell us what they need. Take a look at these signs of deficiency to see what your plant is craving.
Homemade plant food is ideally used for outdoor plants since smells and ease of application can vary. Adding plant food to potted plants can also be a little messy, so be extra careful when adding homemade plant food to your indoor plants.
Keep in mind that some ingredients, like ammonia, can be unpleasant to your eyes or nose, so double-check your ingredients and recipes before you start adding them to your plants! Most items can be purchased at your local grocery store if you don’t already have them around your home.
Natural Fertilizer Choices For The Garden: Which Is The Best?
The most accurate way to detect nutrient deficiency in your soil is to get the soil tested. Many at-home soil testing kits can be bought at your local gardening or hardware store, but keep in mind that most of these tests are analyzing pH levels. If you want to test deficiency for a specific element (nitrogen, for example), you’ll want to contact a Cooperative Extensions Service (CSREES) or a local commercial soil laboratory. This can either come with a small fee or no fee depending on where you live.
Now that you’ve learned a few ways to feed your hungry plants, keep a close eye on them in the following weeks to see how they respond to their new food. Adjust how often and how much you feed your plant based on how they react. If your plants start to perk up, you can afford to feed them a little more and see if it helps its growth. You can also try picking up
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