The deal with fertilizing

You know what's the #1 thing I see people do with their vegetable gardens that keeps them from having a badass harvest?

They don't feed their plants.

Me so hungry

Sure - they may add some compost or something when they put the plants in the ground in the spring time and you KNOW they're watering the ever loving hell out of that garden for oh a month or so anyway, but I hardly see anyone go back to feed their plants with even a general purpose fertilizer.

Feeding - or fertilizing - is a crucial element in the Growing Your Own Food process. Without feeding your plants, they're not going to have enough nutrients available through simply foraging in the soil with their root systems to produce the kind of big belly filling harvests that I know you want.

Now THAT is a harvest

Right? Don't we all put our vegetable plants in the ground expecting to be able to return with a big ol' basket to fill to the brim?

Yes. Yes we do. I can see you nodding your heads.

Let me put it to you the way that it was put to me:

Plants need food to make food. 

This harvest was not produced on water alone

Oh. Right.

Just like you wouldn't just give a kid glass after glass of water and expect them to grow up big and strong, your vegetable plants need more than just water to produce food for you to eat.

Not that I'm insinuating that you feed your kids so that you can eat them or anything - that's just weird - but I think you see what I'm getting at.

If you were a tomato plant, you'd be drooling at this compost tea right now

Fertilizing is important. It's how our hard working vegetable plants go from simply surviving to thriving and producing.

But how do you fertilize different vegetable plants? Do they all like the same things? Do they take their meals three times a day? How much time are we really talking about here? And, come on, does it really make that big of a difference?

I'm glad you asked.

How to fertilize different vegetable plants
So, you are totally right to wonder whether different plants want different fertilizers - they do. In some part.

I'll have my dressing on the side, please.

See, all vegetable plants need the same 16-18 macro and micro nutrients to carry out their biological processes. Some of these are macro nutrients, which they need more of (hence the "macro") for the more fundamental of processes like building cells and photosynthesis and some are micro nutrients, which they need trace amounts of to carry out more specialized processes like production of fruit and seeds and protection from stress.

A good way to go about feeding your plants what they need throughout the growing season, beyond your usual soil building and composting regimen, is to side dress (or apply to the soil around your plants) with a balanced organic vegetable-specific fertilizer, fertilizer tea or compost tea on a regular basis throughout the growing season in amounts based on the growth stage of your plants.

If you don't have access to worm castings to make tea, you can also make a fertilizer tea from a good organic vegetable fertilizer like Gardner & Bloome's Tomato, Vegetable & Herb fertilizer.

A bonus of using a good balanced and organic fertilizer is that it'll usually also have added beneficial soil microbes and mycorrhizae that will boost productivity of the root systems, fend off soil pathogens and other good science-y stuff that I won't weigh you down with right now.

Just know - you're probably not getting all this goodness with the synthetic stuff. It's the fast food cheeseburger of plant foods and it's not doing your garden any favors.

When to fertilize your vegetable plants
We like to side dress all of our vegetables, fruits and herbs with worm casting tea on a monthly basis throughout the growing season, starting with the first flower set or, in the case of vining plants, when the vines start to run.

Can you hear the dinner bell? Because we can.

Depending on the vegetable fertilizer you use, you may only fertilize once every 4-6 weeks. Take a read of the package instructions.

The crucial feeding times are when your plants are performing the most energy-sucking activities like producing flowers, sending out vines and setting fruit, so these are also a good reminders that it's time to feed.

Once you have the general purpose vegetable fertilizer going, you can focus on providing the specific nutrients that your individual crops need.

For instance, broccoli needs a little extra boron to form solid stems and tomatoes need calcium to avoid blossom end rot.

What kind of results you can expect
Fertilizing isn't a miracle or a cure all or any other kind of mystical magic silver bullet for your vegetable garden, but it is the difference between a so-so harvest and an awesome one.  It's also the difference between vegetables that look good but taste sorta bland and ones that knock you back in your chair with WHY DOESN'T ALL FOOD TASTE LIKE THIS?! flavor. It can also be the difference between plants that are attacked by pests and plants that are healthy and vigorous.

When you combine a feeding plan with soil building, companion planting, crop rotation and appropriate watering, your harvests will boom, your pest problems won't be so severe and your garden will thrive like it means business.

And business is gooooooooooooooood

Poo and pretty flowers

It's the first day of spring so let's make poo brew!

What? Isn't that what you do to celebrate?

Sorry, first let's look at some pretty flowers...

Ahhh...happy spring to us all.

Now let's make poo brew. Or, more specifically, worm casting tea.

This poo brew, or worm casting tea for the conservatives of you out there, is simply the harvested worm castings from your worm bin steeped in water and then strained of debris.

This tea can then be applied as a gentle all-purpose fertilizer to young vegetable seedlings and perennials alike.

You can spray it on plants' leaves or water it in to the soil to give them a good nutritious boost and to add an extra layer of defense against pests and pathogens.

You don't have to worry about burning your plants with worm casting tea like you might with other fertilizers and you can feed your growing plants every other week or so for increased productivity.

So let's do this...

1.  Add a handful of worm castings to a five gallon bucket filled with about three gallons of raw (unsoftened) water or rain water.
   
   
   
2. Stir the castings into a dark brew and allow it to sit uncovered for 24-48 hours. You can come back and stir it about halfway through if you like, but don't let it sit for too long because it will go anaerobic and stink to high heaven. Seriously, now.
   
3. Once it has been sitting and the solids have settled at the bottom, pour the tea through a fine mesh strainer into another bucket. Don't let any bits of debris fall into your strained tea because it will clog your sprayer.
   
   
   
4. Pour your strained tea into a pump sprayer if you want to apply to your plants' leaves or into a watering can to apply directly to the soil.
   
   
   

That's it.

If you want to use the solids that settled during the steeping process (How resourceful! I knew I liked you.), they can be spread alongside established plants as a nutritious side dressing.

Feed young seedlings with worm compost tea after they've been in their growing medium for about three weeks to replenish the nutrients lost during leaching and feed established plants every other week or so during the growing season.

Is it tea time? I'd like some crisps, too, if I may.

Otherwise known as poo

I don't know about you guys, but we've been hearing more and more about worm castings, worm casting tea and the amazing benefits of all of it for the garden.

Worm castings, otherwise just known as worm poo, are a pretty magical substance. Think better root structure (which means more robust plants), pest control, soil porosity (like water and nutrients can make it to the roots which have more room to grow and penetrate the soil), organic nutrient delivery, no risk of burning (like you'd have with synthetic fertilizers) and so on.

So given all of those bonuses and the relatively small scale operation required for keeping worms, we decided to try vermicomposting (the fancy word for worm keeping) in the test garden so that we could harvest our own worm castings, make worm casting tea and, you know, take on about 500 new pets without having to relocate to a multi-acre farm site since those don't really exist within the confines of Santa Clara County.

Last weekend we harvested our first full batch of castings from our single worm bin operation and thought we'd show you the goods that will be available for purchase along with our vegetable seedlings later this spring and - if you're considering starting up a worm operation, or you have one going and haven't harvested yet, here's a little step-by-step that should help you on your way to raking in all that poo goodness.

Hey - poo can be good.

How to Harvest Worm Castings

There are actually a few ways to do this, but we're using a method that involves hand sorting. This is good if you have a decent outdoor area with good light and want to hold on to as many worms, their cocoons and castings as possible.

We are greedy, so this is how we do it.

Before you decide to harvest your worms, let them go without their weekly meals for at least a week so that you don't have to sort out too much unprocessed food.

Materials

Plastic sheeting - about 6' square

One 5 gallon bucket
Another container for your separated worms
About one pound of food scraps
Enough shredded newsprint (black and white stuff only, please) to build a 2-4" layer on the bottom of your bin
Water to wet your newsprint
Patience. Oh so much patience.

Harvesting

1. Set up your harvest area with the plastic sheeting, new bedding at the ready, food for the apres-sorting feast back in the bin, a water source and your containers for castings and worms.

Sorting area

Bin - pre-sorting

New bedding all ready to go

2. Turn your worm bin over onto the center of the plastic and sort your worms into many (we had a dozen) pyramidal piles.

Overturned worm bin. Mmmm...

Pyramidal piles with worms racing to the bottom.

3. Wait about 10 minutes so that the worms can all travel to the bottom of the piles (they don't like the light) and then go from one pile to the next scooping off the top of the piles into your castings bucket and the worms into your worm container.

These were some unprocessed snacks that went right back into the bin.

This is a good time to set up your bin anew by putting the bedding material in the bottom of the bin (we used shredded paper and tissue), wetting it until it's the consistency of a damp sponge and setting it near your sorting operation.

About those piles: you can revisit the piles after one pass through to make sure you got all the worms out or just do all of the sorting the first time through.

If you come across any unprocessed food scraps, just chuck them back into the awaiting bin full of new bedding.

This whole corner went back into the bin. Next time we'll hold out on the meals for longer than a week.

4. When you're done sorting (and this can take a while, especially if it's not very bright where you're working and the worms take their sweet time heading for the basement), empty your worms into the new bin, add food to one corner and cover everything (worms and all) with a fresh cover layer of shredded paper.

We sent the worms back with some of their castings, too. To make it homier. Also because it's tedious work otherwise.

Apres-sorting feast.

New cover layer tucking in our wiggly friends.

Add the cover and then stow it away in its safe spot - somewhere shady, cool and protected.

And with those amazing worm castings, you can either spread them on your crops and plants as a side dressing (a few handfuls for every 50 square feet or so) and water them in, or you can make worm casting tea.

Make worm casting tea
In your 5 gallon bucket, add a handful or two of worm castings. Fill the bucket about 3/4 with water and let steep for up to 2 days. Strain the liquid through cheesecloth into a garden sprayer or watering can and use it within 48 hours by spraying directly onto the leaves and soil of your plants.  You can also use the strained castings as a diluted top dressing for the soil.

Channel your inner Native American and waste nothing! Not even poo.