You don’t need to spend a fortune on boutique fertilizer for organic gardening. While there are plenty of store-bought options available, many of the best fertilizer ingredients are found right at home.
Here is a quick guide to the best DIY fertilizer for your organic garden:
Some of the best organic fertilizers are found right in your kitchen trash. Instead of throwing everything away, try collecting your organic food waste and composting it. Your homemade fertilizer made from compost will provide plenty of nutrients to every plant in your organic garden.
Washed and crushed eggshells make a simple DIY fertilizer for plants that love calcium. In addition to providing this valuable mineral plants crave, the calcium carbonate in eggshells can also help lower the acidity of your garden soil.
If your plants prefer more acidic soil, coffee grounds are your perfect choice of DIY fertilizer. You can sprinkle used coffee grounds over the soil surface, or soak the grounds for a few days to make “plant coffee.”
Bananas and their peels are an excellent source of potassium. Some plants such as roses thrive with extra potassium in their environment. If you have an organic rose garden, bury banana peels in the top layer of soil to feed your blooms.
No need for a yard waste bin - pesky weeds from your garden can actually help your plants grow when used as fertilizer. To prevent them from propagating and taking over your garden, however, create a “tea” by soaking pulled weeds in water for a week or more.
Grass clippings are another form of yard waste you can put to good use instead of throwing them away. Collect the clippings from your lawn mower to create a DIY weed-blocking mulch layer for your garden soil.
Rather than throw away bags and bags of leaves in fall, use them as a DIY organic garden fertilizer. Leaves can benefit your garden by attracting earthworms, retaining moisture, lightening soil texture and providing trace minerals to the soil.
No matter the source, manure is rich in nitrogen and other key nutrients perfect for plants. If you have chickens, cows or horses, you have a free and plentiful supply of natural fertilizer at the ready.
Whether you’re growing flowers or a vegetable garden, keep these natural fertilizers in mind as an alternative to synthetic fertilizers. Not only will you be recycling valuable organic resources, you’ll be saving money at the same time.
Dating back to the 1970s when his father put him in charge of the family real estate business, Jeffrey Germagian has built a longstanding portfolio of real estate transactions and developments. Along the way, he has grown the family’s original company, then known as Baystate Realty, to the elite status it represents today as ERA Key Realty Services.
Although we’ve expanded our real estate offerings and our branding has evolved to represent all of the real estate services that we provide, ERA Key Realty, The Baystate Group still holds true to the honest business practices and principles that Jeffrey’s father set out with decades ago.
Jeffrey manages the Baystate Group which specializes in traditional home resales, land development, and 55 communities.
He lives in Hopedale, MA, and serves the local towns in the area including most suburbs of Boston as well as southwest of Boston. He is a Certified Residential Specialist and is fully licensed as a real estate agent to practice throughout the entire state of Massachusetts.