Does anyone here side-dress their gardens? It is mostly used for veggie crops, but can be used on flowers as well. If so, what do you use? I blend my own fertilizer for most of my crops, but I simply use fish emulsion for my nitrogen feeders.
not sure the meaning of side dress. We have had very good luck with manure produced here. My daughter's rabbit manure can be put directly on the garden (and is) The wasted hay works very well to keep weeds down. I hear you can add the sheep manure too. But I only dig out the run in occasionally. With the shortage of nitrogen fertilizers, I guess I can add a tiny bit of chicken manure.
I mixed some Miracle Grow Garden soil with the dirt and will water with Miracle Grow plant food every 2 weeks and that's it.
Side dressing is adding fertilizer to your crops after they are in the ground a while. I try to side dress every 2-4 weeks if I can. We have such a short growing season the plants need all the help they can get. Some growers advise side dressing on a regular basis until you don't notice a difference in the growth rate. When I use liquid fertilizers, or soluble fertilizers, I simply use a "calibrated" watering can and place a given amount at the base of each plant (or near), but when I use my own blended fertilizer, I have a long funnel device that allows me to place a given amount around the base of each plant without bending over. Last summer I couldn't follow my side dressing routine for a variety of reason, and it certainly made a big difference in yield.
When I had my vegetable garden in the ground I side dressed with an organic fertilizer every two weeks. Now I'm only container gardening I use Liquid Fertilizer at half strength every 10 days to 2 weeks.
My daughter puts piles of straight rabbit raisins at the end of rows and as we weed we can rake that in. It does not burn. And most plants love it.
When I gardened, I was all organic. I tilled in lots of manure and alfalfa hay waste in the spring. I used the furrow row method and had a master ditch at the high end of the garden. That ditch was deep and I kept it almost full of manure, cow, goat, sheep, and chicken. I pumped water into it and it irrigated all the other furrow rows with enhanced water so every watering had some organic fertilizer in it.
I always dressed my garden, but myself not so much when in the garden. There is something about topless gardening that makes it more natural. I was never into nude gardening but loved wearing nothing but shorty shorts while weeding and irrigating, especially the melons.
I always thought topless gardening was pinching back seed heads and dead heading flowers you didn't want haha.
Oh dear, sorry about your misunderstanding. I always waited till the flowers were in full bloom before gardening topless and later when deadheading, I would wear a sports bra or crop top to show respect for their short life span.
@Don Alaska If side dressing is routine fertilizing, then what is cross dressing as it refers to gardening? Is it what the bees do when pollinating? I must catch up on all these new urban gardening terms. @Al Amoling Love the new profile photo! I mean that Trump hat on your handsome head is just the best.
Not familiar with cross dressing a garden, so I assume it is a chuckle. We side-dress organically as well for the outside gardens, but not always in the greenhouses. It sounds like you were using a system of manure/compost tea in situ for your fertilizer. I have used kelp and alfalfa tea, and I used manure tea in the days we had livestock.