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That’s a good thing. I have always been a firm believer in putting back into the soil what was once taken out of the soil. Composting has become almost everybody’s method of making organic fertilizer. It just makes good sense to gather your eggshells, banana peels, carrot tops and leftover pasta and give it all back to the earth. The world of organic fertilizers goes well beyond composting. Bone meal, blood meal, fish fertilizer, kelp meal, and processed sewage are all organic plant foods that have been processed and packaged so we can easily add it to our gardens. The advantages of organic fertilizers are plentiful. Organic fertilizers improve the physical soil structure as well as supply nutrients. They usually contain all kinds of micronutrients which are found along with the usual nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. And organic fertilizers are safe. If you make a mistake and apply too much fertilizer, you likely would not need to fret, provided the product used was organic fertilizer. So why aren’t organic fertilizers taking over the gardening world by storm? Talk to a commercial grower and you’ll get the answer. The biggest advantage of chemical fertilizers is that they have been largely responsible for the huge increase in yields we have seen in the last several decades. When you and I go grocery shopping, we want the biggest vegetables for the lowest price. We want consistent quality, good colour, great taste, and good appearance. For grass, we want the thickest, greenest, weed free lawn, for a low price. And for our flower bouquets we want big blooms with vibrant colours, and long lasting performance without paying an arm and a leg. Greenhouse growers will tell you that the only way they can satisfy our desires is with chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers allow the grower to apply the exact amount of plant food to a particular crop. Commercial growing has become a science and the blend of quantity, type, and quality of plant food is very critical to the growing process. Another advantage of chemical fertilizers has to do with volume. It takes a huge amount of cattle manure, for example, to add up to the equivalent in chemical fertilizer for your lawn. It is also rather awkward to apply manure on your grass, while applying a bag of Golfgreen is rather simple. Consistency is another concern, particularly for commercial growers. It is difficult to determine the precise fertilizer value of organic plant food. It fluctuates constantly, and would cause a grower’s careful fertilizer program to go out of whack. My kids have their own misgivings about organic plant food. They make their point perfectly clear every time the neighbour spreads fresh cow manure on the field next to us. “Eeew, how can you stand it, Dad?” they complain. But then I remind them that farmers were here long before us city slickers came along. |
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