Feeding Your Plants: Compost & Organic Homemade Fertilizers

So now that we have started our seeds we should prepare for the time when they will need feeding.  Since I’ll be growing all of my plants in containers, and not in the earth, they cannot gather nutrients from surrounding soil and will quickly eat up the nutrients in their containers, so I’m going to make a combination of organic liquid fertilizers and compost to feed my plants.

I won’t need to feed my plants for a few more weeks, right now the seedlings are being fed by their endosperm inside the seed.  This endosperm provides enough nutrients for the seed to grow a set of primary leaves and start the plant off on the right foot.  Once the primary leaves are established the endosperm has been used up and the plant now needs to get nutrients from the sun and the soil to grow.  Once this happens I will need to repot the seedlings into live soil and begin feeding them.

There are three basic nutrients that commercial chemical/synthetic fertilizers supply; Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potash (Potassium), listed in that order on the packaging. Chemical fertilizers contain extremely high levels of these nutrients, 10-10-10 or 20-20-20. They do this because it makes the plant grow quickly and look lush and healthy, unfortunately such high levels of N-P-K not only destroy the food web in the soil but the rapid plant grown leads to weak, watery, plant tissue that is more prone to insect and disease attacks.  The levels of N-P-K your plants actually need are much smaller; 6-8-6.

Chemical fertilizers also fail to provide the other nutrients that your plants need to be healthy and happy.  While nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium are important so are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, magnesium, copper, cobalt, sodium, boron, molybdenum, and zinc. If you only give them high doses of NPK then you aren’t giving your plants (and subsequently your food) all the nutrients they need to be healthy.  The fertilizers I will use, compost, seaweed and fish fertilizers, supply all of these nutrients in varying amounts. By using all three in combination I’m ensuring that my plants are given the best possible chance in their containers.
Anyway,  now is the time to start making compost and your liquid fertilizers.

Compost:
Once again living above ground presents an issue, but not a large one. Since I can’t toss my kitchen scraps outside and let them biodegrade on their own I use vermicomposting and compost inside my apartment with the help of red wiggler worms.  You can easily buy vermicoposters (from anywhere from $40-$140), or make you own (I made mine for $15).

To make mine I bought two 40L tupperware boxes, drilled large holes in the bottoms for drainage and small holes in the sides for airation. I took the lid of one bin and put it on the ground, I then took bin number one and sat it on top of the lid. I then lined the bin with mesh and filled the bottom with 50% peatmoss, coir, or leaves %50 1” strips of black and white newspaper. Cover the bin with the lid from the second bin. The second bin won’t be used until your worm bin is full and your worms are ready to move on to greener pastures (ie more food scraps in the new bin). And TA DA!  What you now have is a lovely little home for your worms.

You can buy a pound of worms (if you know where to look) for about $40, which is stupid since worms exist in nature and multiply like mad if given the right conditions, so dont buy them, go meet your neighbours and ask them if they have a composter and if you can have some of their worms.  You wont need many, worms can double their population in 4 months. Once you have your worms put them in your bin. Start collecting all of your kitchen scraps (but not meat, fish or dairy products) and every few days dig a hole in your bin fill it with your scraps and cover it up. When you have more scraps dig a new hole.

The Compost Education Center of Greater Victoria has tons of information on composting, and a very helpful PDF on vermicompost. Here is a video link for how to make your own worm bin, mine isn’t like theirs but it’s not a bad design either.

A few things you might be concerned about.

1. Worms. Don’t be silly, they are lovely, no need to be concerned about them.
2. Fruit flies. I don’t like them either, however if everything is going well with your worm bin, there will be no fruit flies.  If you have them it’s because your food scraps are not covered well enough, just toss some shredded newspaper on top and you’ll be fine.
3. Smell. There will be no smell. My worms live in the bathroom and go completely unnoticed.

I heart composting. Once your compost is ready you can use it as is or make compost tea.

Compost tea:

Basically your compost dissolved in water. Fill a container loosely with your aged compost. Fill the container with water. Stir mixture every day. After a week, your tea is ready to use. Sometimes if your vermicomposter is wet enough some will drain out into the lid your bin rests on. If so, wonderful, the work is done for you. Just pour that on top of your plants and they will love you.

The only downside is that composting is that takes a little while. A pound of worms can eat 7 pounds of food scraps a week, which is pretty amazing, however not fast enough for my plants. So instead I’m making seaweed fertilizer.

Seaweed Fertilizer:
Collect your seaweed, some people say certain kinds are better than others, but I’ll take what I can get. Wash your seaweed with fresh water or  let it sit in the rain for a few days. This helps to get rid of the seaweed’s salt deposits. You don’t want to be pouring salt all over your veggies so this is an important step.
Fill a large, topless barrel with equal amounts of seaweed, and water (an important note: Any time I say the word bucket or barrel, know that I got this for free from a restaurant and there is no way you should ever have to go out and buy one. Restaurants go through these buckets like it’s going out of style. Just walk up and ask for any empty buckets they have. If you don’t take them, they’re going to the land fill. So for the love of peatmoss stop buying them!).  Let sit for eight weeks, stirring thoroughly every two or three days. After 8 weeks strain the mixture and pour over your plants (In a garden you can use the seaweed as a slug deterrent.  Place the seaweed around your plants and let it dry there, the slugs will not crawl over the dried sharp edges.

Now I’m going to warn you, seaweed smells terrible. I keep mine on the balcony and have been keeping a lid on it to keep the smell in, but I’m worried that it needs to be left uncovered, so I’m experimenting to see how badly it makes my balcony smell and if that smell will drift inside…ew. But ultimately I think it’s worth it. Commercial seaweed fertilizers are insanely expensive, and making it is easy.

Fish Fertilizers:
You can make this too, you just need to collect dead fish carcasses and let them sit in water… or something like that. I haven’t tried and I don’t think I’m ready to yet. If I do I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time I’ll buy it. Unfortunately if you are going to use either seaweed or fish fertilizers you should use both. The levels of nutrients they have individually would off balance your plants, but together they give them a balanced level of the nutrients they need.

I’ll upload pictures of my seaweed fert. and my compost soon.

Hope that was helpful. If you want more info on soil and compost check our the resource section of the blog. I’m posting links there and some of them go quite indepth.