Fertilizing the perennial garden.

(OR FEED EM AND WEEP)

In the book PERENNIAL CLASSICS the author Melinda R. Cordell offers some great advice on fertilizing your beautiful yards and gardens. Melinda worked as a municipal horticulturist in a public garden, as well as myriad gardens around the city. In her career she has worked as a landscape designer, perennials grower, greenhouse manager, and landscaper. Some of her other writing she has authored the Easy Growing Gardening Series as well.

Below is a excerpt from her book p51 of PERENNIAL CLASSICS:

“Unlike roses.Which chug miracle grow as if it were water?Perennials don’t need a whole lot of extra fertilizer. In fact, if you give them too much fertilizer, perennials get leggy and tend to flop.Or your perennials become particularly juicy from too much nitrogen in their fertilizer. They get attacked by various diseases and insects. Or the perennials might end up being more.Interested in producing leaves then blossoms?.

Now,a moderate amount of fertilizer is perfectly fine. A good time to throw down granular fertilizer is in early spring when the new growth is pushing up, and it’s also time to give the perennial something.Fertilizer and late spring as they all get geared up for summer. A slow release fertilizer broadcast around the plants should last for three to six months depending on brand and quality.

Now.Some perennials will need a little more fertilizing daylilies, peonies, chrysanthemums and flocks.Like a spring and summer feeding. Also delphiniums, daisies and lungwort.Pulmonaria.We’ll be happy to get a little.Fertilizer in mid season.

But the very best thing that you can do for your soil.Is to add compost.Using compost is a much more environmentally friendly.Solution than using commercially produced fertilizers.That pollute the environment.

I used to wonder What the big deal about compost was. I’d look at numbers on a bag of compost. Usually there’s something super low like 1-3-1.These numbers show.The amount of the three main elements that the bag of compost has, that is.1% nitrogen, 3% phosphorus, 1% Potassium.NPK.If you use the chemical symbols.The amount of NPK in say, miracle grow is usually something like 30- 30-30.That’s a lot! And yet many plant people urge you to use compost on the soil. Why is that?

It is because compost is full of hummus which builds the soil like no man made fertilizer can do. Soil works best when it’s a living Organism. That sounds like weird stuff, but hear me out. The best soil, whether it’s sandy, silty, clay, or loam, always consists of several things. It contains a good amount of organic material. The organic material provides food for the organisms that live in the soil and untold number of arthropods.(insects and other critters)Bacteria, Protozoa, Worms, Nematodes, etc. Etc. When you have a flourishing ecosystem underground, they make the area great for plant roots. Some of these creatures help break down organic materials into bits small enough for plant roots to absorb.Some soil organisms actually increases the reach of plant roots so they can pull more nutrients.In elements out of the soil, which makes them healthier.

Organic material is the bedrock, so to speak, of good soil function. But if you don’t replenish the organic material in the soil, eventually the creatures of the soil cannot find any more to eat. They die, becoming organic material themselves, but in each generation that dies off, they leave less and less and less of themselves and the soil until they’re gone for good. And without organic material and busy soil organisms to keep the soil alive, the soil becomes Thís pallid, dusty place. The soil also becomes very hard to work, hard to break, and when you do break it up, it has no cohesion. Plants will grow in the soil, but they won’t thrive.”