A lot of you are really interested in the fertilizers that we use as you’ve probably gathered we know some stuff. We don’t blame you, gardeners want results! And we demonstrate that! But, the truth is, the more I’ve understood about fertilizers and growing food, the more obvious a “one size fits all” solution does not exist.
Yesterday, we talked about pH and that we’re now correcting our fertigation additions. Well, we also made a major change with the fertilizer we’re using at our home gardens this year. Many of you know that we’ve brought home tons of produce by using water soluble fertilizers, specifically the Jack’s line up. This topic very much threads into yesterday’s post, and yes, it’s more about pH.
I’ve had my nose in a lot of studies on pH, fertilizers and soil since last season. I’m trying to more deeply understand this very complex relationship. One of the more important take aways I discovered was the relationship between pH and a given fertilizer. To boil a complex topic down, fertilizers have a significant effect on the substrate (or soil) pH. More specifically, any given fertilizer will “trend acidic” or “trend basic,” indicating the pH direction you’ll experience by using that fertilizer.
We mentioned yesterday that our home gardens are heavily influenced by peat moss, which tends to have an acidic affect on the soil substrate. During this deep dive, I also learned that the fertilizer that we’ve been using (i.e. Jack’s) is also one that “trends acidic.” Meaning, we’ve been inadvertently compounding elements that are driving our pH downward.
Now, obviously, former me truly believed that if you throw enough NPK from a quality fertilizer at the problem, you can overcome pretty much anything. And, present me does agree with that. But, future me wants to optimize and perfectly balance salt additions to my soil. I’ve realized achieving an ideal nutrient uptake will establish a more sustainable path forward. For decades, this is the same mistake that “big ag” has made. The science is fairly recent that shows there’s a better way.
We’ve introduced Masterblend into our fertilizer mix and that’s been our primary fertilizer at our home gardens this year. We like it, a lot. It’s a bit more complicated than Jacks, being a three part fertilizer that has to be mixed separately. Those three parts being a complete fertilizer blend, plus magnesium sulfate (or Epsom salts, for magnesium and sulfur) and calcium nitrate (for calcium and more nitrogen). Which, is everything we need for stellar plants in either soil or hydroponics.
Even though we are dabbling in hydroponics this season, we didn’t have to make a fertilizer change to support that. We could have used Jack’s. The core reason we made this change is due to those pH trends I mentioned. Masterblend “trends basic,” meaning we can balance the acidity of the peat moss in our soil. This works to create a more stable pH and will trend towards neutral, meaning we technically need less fertilizer. As we mentioned, we’re seeing results by paying attention to pH and customizing our fertilizer choices to our actual gardens and soils.
What I’ve fundamentally realized is to create an optimal growing environment, one cannot disconnect things like the soil and water used on a garden and the choice of fertilizer that you use. We’re even seeing a major difference between our house water and rain water in regard to pH. As much as we want to ignore things like pH as gardeners, you can’t do that if you’re trying to perfect your craft of growing! All of these things are intertwined.
I know many of you may dismiss this discussion as “too much.” But, I’ll tell you, what I’m talking about here is probably one of the more important things I’ve understood about growing plants and using fertilizers in the last decade.
