Property News · August 21, 2022

Grow healthy plants with no need for feed


Trees, shrubs and borders are quite happy without fertiliserThere is much received wisdom in horticulture that essentially takes a standard idea from agriculture and scales it down to the level of a domestic garden plot. While this might initially seem sensible, it turns out that pretty much every aspect of a garden is totally different to a farmer’s field, so, in reality, this approach rarely works. Perhaps the most important of these mistaken approaches lies in how we fertilise our plots. Changing how you do this will almost certainly save you time, money and even help the environment, too.A lot of standard horticultural advice is based on the premise that regular applications of fertiliser are absolutely crucial to healthy plant growth. This means lugging around big bags of manure to dig in each autumn, often after a summer of dosing up hundreds of watering cans with liquid feed. According to some advice on growing tomatoes, for example, you’d likely spend more on fertiliser than the value of the fruit you get. However, the scientific reality is that the vast majority of these laborious applications are not just entirely unnecessary, but can actually produce worse results. Excess nitrogen, for example, has been widely demonstrated to result in soft, sappy, growth that is less resistant to environmental stresses, reduces the sugar content of harvests and even suppresses flowering. That’s before we consider the fact that run-off can pollute groundwater and the huge amount of carbon emissions created in the production of fertiliser in the first place. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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