FAQ: Why is summer fertilizing a must for your garden?
Answer: To make your garden grow healthy with many vegetables and fruits.
Discover the incredible benefits that summer fertilizing can bring to your vegetable garden.
Fertilizers provide a rich array of nutrients your plants need to thrive and flourish. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about summer fertilizing, such as
- Understanding summer fertilizing basics
- Choosing the correct fertilizer for your garden
- How and when to apply summer fertilizers
- Why you need to water your garden after applying granular fertilizer.
Understanding Summer Fertilizing Basics
Before going to your local garden center to buy fertilizer, perform a soil test in your vegetable garden. You don’t know what’s lacking until you test it. You can get a low-cost soil test through your local cooperative extension.
You’ll need three cups of soil from various areas of your garden and put it in a Ziplock bag for the laboratory to test.
Then, send your sample to your local cooperative extension for testing. In a few weeks, the coop will send you the test results for pH and available nutrients in your soil. The major nutrients to look for are NPK.
What’s NPK? It stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—the three major nutrients needed to grow healthy vegetables and fruits.
Nitrogen helps plants grow upward, phosphorus benefits the root system, and potassium gives your garden overall nutrition.
Your soil test will give you a pH reading as well. The test should recommend lime or garden sulfur to get it to the right pH level.
Read more: How Often Do I Need to Check My Soil?
After you amend the soil to the correct pH and nutrient levels, you only need to fertilize it yearly to maintain basic fertility.
Choosing the Correct Fertilizer for Your Garden
Once you receive your soil test results, you’ll see what nutrients are missing.
Do you go to a big box store and pick up any type of vegetable fertilizer to fix it?
No, it would be best if you did more sleuthing than picking up the first fertilizer bag on sale.
First of all, you can buy synthetic or organic fertilizers. What’s the difference between the two?
Synthetic fertilizers are man-made and designed to deliver nutrients quickly into the soil. Most vegetables don’t need quick-release fertilizers, with tomatoes being the exception.
Too much quick-release fertilizer leads to leaching into storm drains, aquifers, and well water.
On the other hand, natural or organic fertilizers are slow release and come from plants, animals, or minerals. Examples include manure, compost, and blood meal so that microbes slowly break down the fertilizer in the soil.
Algae, bacteria, and fungi are the three microbes that break down natural fertilizers. These microbes eat the fertilizer slowly and at different rates.
Plus, microbes provide a bonus to the soil. They die off and release more nutrients as they decay.
You’ll see different fertilizer brands when you’re at the garden center. Take your soil test results with you to get the correct ratio of NPK that your garden needs.
You’ll also see different numbers, such as 10-10-10, on fertilizer bags. These numbers represent each nutrient’s percentage of weight in the bag. Nitrogen is the first number, phosphorous is the second number, and potassium is the third number.
For example, if you buy a 50 lbs. bag of fertilizer, you’ll have five pounds (10%) of nitrogen, five pounds (10%) of phosphorous, and five pounds (10%) of potassium.
The remaining 70% consists of filler and static ingredients that help distribute the nutrients in the soil.
How and When to Apply Summer Fertilizers
The Almanac.com says that edibles (vegetables and fruits) need fertilization in early spring.
After working in the granular fertilizer, water the soil to activate it. Here’s a rundown on different plants’ summer fertilizing needs
- Leafy greens like arugula, lettuce, and kale need summer fertilizing while growing quickly in early summer.
- Corn and squash, longer season crops, need early summer fertilizing before they rapidly take off.
- Potatoes and tomatoes also start growing quickly and need mid-summer fertilizing. Use a low nitrogen fertilizer on tomatoes when flowers appear to encourage more flowering and fruiting.
- Perennial plants like blueberries and strawberries have different summer fertilizing needs. Once June-bearing strawberry season is over, it’s time to apply fertilizer to strawberries. For blueberries, apply fertilizer early in the spring when the buds break.
There are three ways to apply summer fertilizer to your garden:
- Use a broadcast or handheld spreader to distribute fertilizer
- Apply a narrow band of fertilizer next to each row or furrow
- Put down a side-dressing of fertilizer applied at the plants’ root zone, not touching the plants’ stems or leaves, which will burn.
Watch More: Will It Spread in a Brinly Spreader?
Why You Need to Water Your Garden After Applying Granular Fertilizer
You must water your garden right after applying granular fertilizer to activate the fertilizer. Irrigate your garden for 15 minutes to ensure that the fertilizer is activated.
If there’s gentle rain in the forecast, allow it to water in the fertilizer. However, if there’s a call for heavy rain, avoid putting down granular fertilizer because the heavy downpours will wash it away.
Summing Up
You can apply granular fertilizer to your garden for summer fertilizing. Before you add any nutrients, you need to test your soil to see what major nutrients, NPK, are missing from it.
Once you get your test results, you can visit your local garden center to buy the closest NPK ratio your garden soil needs.
Use a fertilizer or handheld spreader to apply the fertilizer in your garden. Water the fertilizer in and watch your garden grow.
Make Summer Fertilizing Easy with Brinly’s Fertilizing Spreaders
Brinly has been in business since 1839, and we’re celebrating our 185 years of business this summer.
Get your next Brinly gardening attachment to make summer fertilizing a breeze. You’ll find that your crops will be bigger and healthier when you put down fertilizer with a Brinly fertilizing spreader!
Discover our full range of Brinly lawn care and garden products designed to keep your property beautiful all year round:
- Fertilizer spreaders
- Ground-engaging tools
- Lawn dethatchers
- Lawn rollers
- Lawn sprayers
- Lawn sweepers
- Spike and plug aerators
- ZTR products.
Ready to upgrade your lawn care and gardening equipment? Shop our Brinly products online now and take the next step toward a stunning lawn and garden.
Need assistance? Our customer service team is here to help. Fill out our contact form with any questions, and we’ll reply promptly.
Sources:
Almanac.com, Let’s Grow! How and When to Fertilize Your Vegetable Garden.
JoeGardener.com, 063 – Garden Fertilizer Basics: What to Know Before Your Grow.
TheSpruce.com, The Right Way to Fertilize Your Garden and Vegetable Plants.
