Heart of the Garden

Why can’t I just make things easy and buy the product everyone wants me to buy? Miracle Gro is EVERYWHERE and it’s fertilizer and it’s all I know about and the ads tell me I should use it. They even sell it at Walgreens. I mean, Nitrogen, Phosporus and potassium are the same no matter where they come from? Right?

Errr! Wrong!

The simple answer (for you to recite when people inevitably take offense at your audacity to rock the Home Depot boat and inconvenience everyone with your alternative enviro-nazism): Miracle Gro uses chemical salts to make the NPK formula in their plant food. If you pour it into your poor unsuspecting plants, you’re basically wiping out all the microbial life in your soil and replacing it with SALT.

So you may get a big growth spurt of leaves (not fruit) for one season, but you’re left with lifeless dirt at the end of it. The point of fertilizing your SOIL (not your plants) is to build up the microbial life (mycorrhizae) living in the there so they can process and carry food to the roots of your plants.

Miracle Gro is like snorting coke to get energy. Using organic methods is like drinking tea and doing yoga.

So, what should you use?

Soil: I love organic mechanics potting soil. They are a local company and they add worm castings to their mix.

Whatever you do, don’t get fooled by Miracle Gro’s “organic” bags of soil at big box stores. Twigs and dirt are organic matter, but the soil was not built up in a chemical-free environment which is the other definition of “organic” they are using to sell their dirt.

Fertilizer: Fish emulsion and liquid kelp for houseplants and everything else. You can get fish emulsion at Home Depot and Lowes people, so it’s really not THAT hard to kick the coke habit!

Liquid seaweed or kelp smells a little less offensive than fish emulsion. Skippy gets all excited when he smells the fish because it smells like …well, it smells like his hiney after a long day at the dog park. You catch my drift. (Or his, rather.)

I’ll get special OMRI approved stuff for orchids and african violets, but everyone can get a splash of fish emulsion and kelp. If you started your plant off with a nice shovel full of compost and/or worm castings, then they don’t need a feeding for a while. Or you can side-dress with compost and worm castings. Tomatoes and roses get crushed up egg shells for calcium.

Thank you for listening to my anti-miracle gro rant. They are seriously evil. Spread the word.