Guide to Feeding Your Vegetable Garden
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Plants absorb vegetables and minerals from the soil, but vegetable plants are rapid growers that deplete available nutrients fairly quickly. Feeding your vegetable garden correctly gives hungry plants a boost and ensures they remain healthy enough to produce a bountiful harvest.
Specific use of fertilizers depends on the particular plant, but the following guide provides the basic information for feeding your vegetable garden.
- Most plants benefit from a good quality, balanced plant food such as a vegetable and herb mix that contains Canadian sphagnum peat moss to improve moisture retention, compost to provide nutrients and encourage activity of helpful microbes, and sand to improve soil drainage.
- Look for a vegetable and herb mix containing mycorrhizae, a beneficial fungi that increases the plants ability to draw nutrients from the soil.
- Work 2 to 4 cm of the substance into the top of the soil before planting vegetable seeds.
- Thereafter, scatter a small amount of organic fertilizer along the rows, or in rings around individual plants every three to four weeks. Use a product with a balanced NPK ratio such as 10-10-10.
- Alternatively, use a slow-release fertilizer that will feed the plant in a gradual, controlled way. Read the label for specifics.
- Avoid high nutrient plant foods (indicated by the N on the front of the package), as too much nitrogen can produce lush green foliage but few vegetables.
- Clay-based soil may need a little less fertilizer, while sandy soil often requires slightly more.
- You can also use a water-soluble fertilizer, which is particularly effective for vegetable plants grown in containers. Water-soluble products are generally applied with a watering can.
- Vegetable plants also benefit from organic products such as fish emulsion or blood meal. However, while such products have great long-term benefits, they may not work quickly enough to save a malnourished plant.
- Apply plant food carefully, as too much fertilizer is always worse than too little.
- Keep fertilizer off the foliage and always water well immediately after feeding.
