Welcome back to Grow & Tell, IPR's biweekly guide to gardening with the seasons.
My name is Dylan Kulik, and today we're going to talk about where to plant our plants in the garden. Then, we'll talk fertilizer.
Picking a spot for your plants
We have our tomato and bee balm seedlings looking ready to go, but we won't plant them yet because it's early May and it's still a little bit too chilly.
Got questions you want Grow & Tell to answer? Email me at dylan.kulik@interlochen.org.
Some things you'll want to consider:
- sunlight
- shelter
- access to water
For the tomatoes, I picked a spot in our hoop house. These tomatoes want a lot of sunlight, so pick a spot that gets a lot of direct sun. It should be sheltered from the wind, so your plants aren't getting whipped around. And most importantly, it's easy to access water from whatever location you choose.
Feeding your plants
Picking a diet for your plants is important. In our case, that diet is fertilizer. Here in northwest Michigan, the soil is so sandy that the nutrition the plants have access to is constantly draining down out of the root interface. So they need a little help.
You've got a couple options: synthetic fertilizer and organic fertilizer.
I'm working with two all-purpose fertilizers, which means they have all of the nutrition that's vital to grow plants. The only difference is that one is organic and one is synthetic.
Synthetic fertilizer
Through a myriad of chemical processes, we are able to get nitrogen and other plant ions that are very, very available to the plants, but they don't really do that much for our soil. They just feed the plants directly.
If you want instant results, you can add some synthetic fertilizer, and you will see your plant grow very, very quickly.
Organic fertilizer
Organic fertilizer is made of naturally occurring substances. The one I have is composed of bone meal, feather meal and blood meal, which sounds a little weird, right? I wouldn't eat it, but it's really good for the soil.
Roots give nutrition to the plants, and that nutrition comes from the soil. By adding organic fertilizers, we do feed the plants eventually, but really who we are feeding more directly are the soil microbiological communities.
That's a fancy way of saying tiny life in the soil — the springtails, rotifers, earthworms, fungi, mold, yeast. All of those organisms are going to create a soil ecosystem suitable for plant growth.
Your tomatoes and other plants are going to excel in that ecosystem.
What to choose
I lean toward using organic fertilizers. But I know plenty of people who prefer synthetic fertilizer because it gives you results fast — you might get better tomatoes in year one.
But again, by using synthetic fertilizer, you're feeding the plant directly, and you're kind of leaving the soil itself by the wayside. You're basically loading this plant up on a bunch of processed sugar so it grows big and fast in the short term, versus giving it a rich, nutritious, well-rounded diet in the long term.
I always tell my students, you are what you eat, and in a very similar way, plants are what plants eat. Just think about that. Let that blow your mind a little bit.
Seriously, though, you decide what's best for you. You are the gardener. You get to call the shots in your garden.
Next time we're gonna put it all together: we'll move these plants into their permanent homes and add some fertilizer directly to the soil as we plant.
Until then, happy gardening!
