Growing your own plants in a garden is truly an amazing thing. A lot of people think of it as a hobby, while others do it to have their own organic products simply because they care a lot about staying healthy. Regardless of what your reason is, today we’re here to help you get on the right track.
As we all know already, compost is something that’s crucial for your garden, because without it, your soil won’t have the required nutrients that your plants need to grow healthy. However, a lot of compost can have negative effects, while too little of it will not be enough to provide the required nutrients.
Thankfully, today’s article will be focused on some of the most important things that you should know about applying compost, including the right amounts, so let’s not keep this introduction any longer and jump straight into the content.
Choosing the right compost
Before you start applying the mixture to the plants in your garden, you should make sure that you have the right type of it. Currently, there are a lot of choices available on the market, but you don’t have to pick anything that’s pre-made if you don’t want to.
Making your own compost is an easy thing to do, and you can find numerous videos and tutorials for it on YouTube. Most experienced farmers already know how to do it, so they prefer to save some money over buying it from the store.
If you are new to gardening and you don’t really know how to do this, you can either spend some time and effort into learning or just reviewing a few different products on the internet and then choosing the one that seems the best for your needs.
How much is enough?
The answer to this question is that it always depends on your soil and the current circumstances in which your plants grow. Some experts say that if your soil is already lacking some of the nutrients, adding tons of compost to it won’t fix the problem. However, it can help you improve the situation up to a certain amount. If you really want to fix the deficiency issue however, you should combine this with a fertilizer.
One important thing to note is that different plants will require different circumstances to grow properly, so make sure that you research for your kind as much as you can.
A general rule of thumb, according to a lot of experts, is to make sure that one acre of soil holds about twenty to thirty pounds of phosphorus. If you are within this range at all times, you shouldn’t experience any “side-effects”. If you didn’t know already, this element can become a pollutant when overused.
Every plant absorbs a different amount of nutrients, and there are many detailed charts about this that you can find online, so make sure that you check them out depending on what you’re trying to grow. The values of nitrogen and phosphorus will vary depending on the type.
If you want to learn some more about ingredients that you can add to your compost mixture, feel free to visit redwormfarms.com.
Balance the phosphorus levels
Phosphorus is an important element that your plants need to grow, but if you go over the limit with it, it can become poisonous. The best way to prevent this is to research about the absorption levels of your plants and check the backside of the compost that you’ve purchased, to check for the phosphorus levels and other unwanted chemicals. You shouldn’t surpass the limits.
One part of the plant, which is crucial for providing nutrients and water, is called “the mycorrhizal fungi”, and this is what gets damaged if the soil contains too much phosphorus. Without these fungi, the plant will be unable to start flowering.
Using what you already have
A very good thing to know is that your garden already makes the required ingredients that you’ll need for great compost. These are leaf trimmings and most of the plants that you already have, which have finished their life-cycle.
However, if you don’t already have a larger garden, collecting enough materials to make a full bag of compost will probably not be an easy task. If you want, you can combine both things at once for the optimal results, one bag from the store and one that you’ve made on your own.
Research the ingredients
No matter what kind of product you decided to purchase, you should always research the ingredients to know if anything can interfere with them. You know exactly what’s in there so that you won’t make the mistake of combining two things that can cause harm to your plants.
If one of the products already contains some ingredient that’s meant to serve as an anti-pesticide, you should avoid adding another additional one, because that would be too many chemical elements for your crops to handle.
Conclusion
Plants might seem like something that’s very easy to maintain and look after, but that’s because the modern citizen doesn’t know all the things that are happening “behind the curtains” in the garden. Even watering isn’t as easy as it seems, because it has to be done with the right amounts of water and at the right time of the day. For example, watering during the hottest periods of the day, especially when your crops are exposed to the rays, will do more harm than good.
The same thing goes for adding compost. You have to be sure in the measures, and you need to know exactly which ingredients you’re adding to the soil, because too much of a good thing can quickly turn into a bad thing.
There isn’t a very direct answer when it comes to how much compost is enough for your type of a garden, but you can easily find the correct amounts by researching about the absorption levels of your plants and the soil. For example, phosphorus is a needed ingredient, but too much of it can poison the soil and destroy the mycorrhizal fungi in the plants.