How To Make Plant Fertilizer At Home
Plants Need Food Too!!
When we buy or acquire a potted plant, most know that plants need watered. Well that soil they're isn't just any soil. It has been enriched with nutrients for the plant to eat. When the plant has eaten the whole supply of nutrients, it cannot get more. It is in a pot and cannot leave that pot.
So we must also supply food, aka fertilizer! Another word for this is mulch.
Fertilizers are expensive; fortunately you can make this easily at home and it will become better than anything you can buy!!
Ingredients: Used coffee can with its lid.
Bio-trash: eg. used coffee grounds with filters, used tea bags, eggshells, leftovers from cutting up fruits and vegetables.
🚫DO NOT USE:⛔️ Oils, meats, seeds, stems, anything hard, non-food products or processed pre-packaged food.
What you now want to do is fill your container with all this as if it is a wastebasket. Seal lid tightly. Wait.
If you need fertilizer immediately go buy it cause it takes a good month for your first patch of mulch to be ready.
ONE MONTH LATER....
Open your container. Mold is good! It may be quite stinky. Take something you don't care about (I use a stick) and mash your mulch.
Then take about 1 tsp. mulch, drop in 1 8 oz. glass of water per plant and feed your plants. I personally do this only once a month. Overfeeding the plants can kill them!
Keep adding to the mulch never buy fertilizer again!
@KindWolf2023 Thank-you for posting this much needed recipe for mulch. I have tried so man times and got to the stinky stage then had to bin the gunk by chucking on the compost heap and burying it lol. I am trying my own compost this year as I cannot do much gardening due to my back healing. So a little trimming and raking up of things into a heap and I will wait and see.
Is it right that cardboard can be mulched too?
Listening - One Step At A Time!
@MistyMagic I don't know. Cardboard is a type of paper which comes from trees. Even so I wouldn't add it to mulch.
Paper filters and paper tea bags are designed to be water permeable and so can be used for mulch. Cardboard won't break down the same way those will.
I recommend against it!
@KindWolf2023 So what do you define as the difference between compost and mulch? 🤔
Listening - One Step At A Time!
@MistyMagic the size of the pile.
Compost is usually a large pile o' crap that is great for outdoor gardening.
Mulch, and the distinction may be just mine, is coffee can sized for house plants.
@KindWolf2023 Also, not sure what you think but I use mulch around the top of plants and compost is usually what they are planted in. I love your coffe can mulch and have started my own 😁 but I also have shredded cardboard ( no plasticized layers) and leaves and other gathered stuff that will rot down over the years to be recycled on my outdoor plants.
Does it matter what season you make the mulch?
Listening - One Step At A Time!
@KindWolf2023
For his outside plants, those on the patio my father would just pee in them once a month.
@Gettingbettertoday ahahahaha ingenious!!
Urea which comes in many things is urine.
Plants got water and waste products in one, did they do well?
@KindWolf2023
These were large potted plants. They grew well.