So, today we’re going to talk about a major shift in how we fertilize our garden once it more fully matures!
It’s easy enough to use a typical watering can to distribute water soluble fertilizers to your plants when they are young. But, once your plants get a bit sizable, that technique becomes a bit more difficult. This is especially true of plants like squash where you might not be able to get within feet of the base of the plant!
So, at a certain point we shift to using what’s called a hose end sprayer. This is an ingenious device that essentially creates a venturi siphon with the water pressure, thus pulling water soluble fertilizer (or in some cases other liquid, like maybe a pesticide) and mixes it fairly precisely with water.
We can simply add in pre-mixed fertilizer at certain ratios to get the desired dosage. The hose end sprayer typically has multiple settings, allowing you to control how much (or how little) you want to mix in. You do have to do a little bit of math and thinking to figure out how to achieve the right dose, but it’s not terribly difficult. Once you get this dialed in, you can precisely apply fertilizer to a large area very quickly!
We mix up fairly large batches of fertilizer concentrate and keep it in gallon jugs. This saves us quite a bit of time over the season, since we’re not mixing up smaller amounts for each fertilizing session.
We’ve used a few different hose end sprayers over the years and we’d generally tell you that “you get what you pay for.” The super cheap units tend to be frustrating and will break down with even reasonable use, whereas the more expensive units tend to be better built and they “just work.” The “good ones” are, perhaps surprisingly, a bit more costly than you’d think.
One of the really nice things about using this technique (and also using water soluble fertilizers) is that it allows a significant amount of foliar feeding. This is basically where the plant draws in nutrients through its leaves, rather than its roots. We’ve found this heavily beneficial for plant growth. Logically, the plant doesn’t have to move the nutrition as far when it’s essentially “everywhere.” This is definitely one of our “trade secrets” to growing massive, in ground squash plants in the subarctic!
This is also one of the main reasons we’ve largely switched from granular fertilizers and moved towards using water soluble fertilizers. We do still use some granular fertilizers in certain applications, but it’s really hard to beat this technique. We can feed our entire 1,700 square foot garden in less than an hour and that includes watering it! Water soluble fertilizers have also won us over as far as their effectiveness. While they do have increased cost, we’ve found the equation worth it.
So, if you’re struggling with how to keep a large garden well fed, this is how we do it!
