We’re going to try something we’ve never done before, a simultaneous triple-channel release about a topic! It’s a topic that causes many gardeners great consternation, can terrify the newer gardener and is hotly contested no matter where you stand. We’re talking about the topic of fertilizing young seedlings!
The prevailing thoughts we see out there is that fertilizing young seedlings is either unnecessary or outright dangerous. Having practiced it for many years, we respectfully disagree. Providing a little bit of immediately available NPK might just be the thing you’re missing in your plant raising process.
There’s not going to be universal agreement about the “right” time to introduce seedlings to fertilizer to young plants. But, we can deduce at least one data point by using what we know about plants. The seed provides the energy to get to the cotyledon stage, then the plant is on its own after that. So, any time after the first true leaves develop, technically that plant can functionally use fertilizer.
Is it necessary that early? No. But, can it be beneficial? By our experience, yes. We’ve talked about it before, but we see more rapid recovery from transplant shock and typically much faster early seedling growth than when we don’t use it. This is important for our short growing season, we just don’t have time for stunted growth and problems with our seedlings.
We’ve also seen nutritional deficiency in the seedling stage, more than a few times. Whether it’s variability in our soil, a lack of some obscure micronutrient or maybe even something stupid we did. Regardless, ensuring you have a complete nutritional profile at all stages of growth eliminates that possibility.
Where we wouldn’t argue, though, is that this is something that does have to be practiced carefully. Especially with very young seedlings. We’re typically talking about using very, very low doses of fertilizer. Like 1/8th to 1/4th of a teaspoon in an entire gallon of water. Miniscule amounts! We don’t want to run a risk of burning our plants, plus we’re not really trying to add rocket fuel to our plants just yet. (That’s for later!)
We often get comments about how good our seedlings look. People can argue with us all they want about what’s right and wrong, but our plants bring home the bacon.
Lastly, if you want to dive even deeper into this topic, you should head on over to our YouTube or Rumble channels and check out our most current release. (It’s available at the exact same time as this post!) While you’re there, you should start a Facebook raid with those people and tell them about our awesome Facebook channel!
We can’t promise we’ll do this multi-release strat much. My brain can barely keep up with all the things we’re doing, much less work in a coordinated way. But, we wanted to try it once just to see what happens.
