Homemade Fertilizer Failure
Seed Testing Failures, bound to happen when you are willing to go above and beyond.
In my effort to keep things simple for you and testing some homemade fertilizers, I have successfully killed almost all of my seed starts.
Below is an email I sent to my subscribers and I wanted to share it here, too.
Lessons I've Learned
There are very few things I get upset over but this is one of them.
I have learned several lessons and I’m going to share 5 of the biggest ones below:
- When doing a test, only test a few plants. In my initial tests, everything was going well and the seeds were thriving, and doing well so I started doing the same thing with all of the starts (No, No.)
I should have stuck with the test samples only instead of using all. I think the amount of nitrogen they received, killed them. - NEVER, NEVER, use chicken manure until it has been aged for several months.
I would clean off my eggs and instead of throwing the water outside in my compost bin, I thought, “I’m just going to use this to water my plants. There’s a large enough ratio that would minimize the amount of nitrogen so they shouldn’t burn.
I was wrong. I knew chicken manure is considered one of the hottest manures because of the amount of nitrogen it has, but I did not realize that even just the little bit in several containers of water was too much. - When experimenting, use a control subject, and then don’t experiment too much so you can track what’s working and what’s not.
I learned about and tried several different homemade fertilizing recipes, banana water, scrap water, alfalfa water, and more.
Maybe one would have been fine but I would do banana water one week and then the next week scrap water and then alfalfa water the following week.
A. I don’t know if one of these fertilizers was the main culprit for murdering my plants or if it was the combination of a couple of them or if they were all bad.
B. I never gave one a chance to really know if it works. I was too anxious and I was wanting them to be beautiful starts. (insert another sad face.) - Patience is a virtue and my mom said I’m lacking it and this proved it.
As gardeners we get soooooo excited watching things grow, which they never grow fast enough.
My enthusiasm got the best of me and tried to force having faster growth.
Because of my lack of patience, I will have to repeat the experiments but exercise much more self-control and patience. - Arrogance, in full honesty and transparency, I wanted to be the “GUY” for you.
I wanted you to be bragging about your plants to your friends and family and say, “You’ve got to check this guy out over at Get to the Roots, he can help you get big beautiful veggies and it’s really simple.”
I’ll eat some humble pie and now hopefully you can say, “Tony screwed up and killed all of his plants continuously trying to make gardening simple for me.”
It’s my goal and mission to make gardening as simple as possible while building your self-esteem so just like life, there are ups and downs.
You’ll have some major successes and also some major failures.
Failure is inevitable if you’re trying to succeed and improve your life.
You will fail so embrace failure as a friend because he’ll gradually introduce you to his twin, Success, they go together.
Thank you for following, let me know if you have any questions. You’re amazing, believe it!
Tony
P.S.
When answering your questions, I do not give you experimental answers. I only give proven principles.