This year, I decided to fertilize all my little fields, vegetable patches, and greenhouses. The biggest one is the newly established, 60 m² field where I run the Three Sisters experiment last year.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Fertilizing this plot of land will consist of growing legumes this year. An approximately 1,5 m wide strip was sown with green peas, a ca. 4 m wide strip was sown with yellow peas, and the rest was sown with alfalfa. I had to use planks to do it; the ground was extremely wet at the time.
I will harvest the green peas for canning, I will let the yellow peas ripen and dry in situ (if the weather allows it), and I will probably mow the alfalfa once with a scythe, and a second time with the lawn mower. The current plan is to leave most of the biomass in place, and till it under in September. After that, I intend to sow it with spelta.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The oats started to poke out of the ground, which makes me happy. I did not fertilize this plot at all, but I will do so with lawn fertilizer in due course. The reasoning is that since oats are grass, a lawn fertilizer should be adequate and not harmful.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
For potatoes and fruigetables I bought organic granulated fertilizers that should release the nutrients slowly over the vegetation period. For the potatoes, I just estimated the ammount and I have spread it on the patches before planting the tubers. For tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse, I weighed the amounts more precisely, and at the lower end of the recommendation written on the packaging. In a greenhouse, too much fertilizer is more harmful than outdoors. I will also fertilize the pumpkins and squash patches.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I watered the greenhouse thoroughly after I applied the fertilizer. I don’t have any tomato plants yet to put there, but I do want to jumpstart the soil biology before planting. And I do have three bell pepper plants that successfully overwintered, and I would like to put them back into the soil asap.
Congratulations on your progress. It’s inspiring to see some nice growth even in early April.
My grandparents always had a “two field system”. One side was planted with veggies, which were mostly legumes, and one side was potatos. Then the next year they’d switch.
My greenhouse is still down, but I’m hopefully raising some squash and courgettes for the mostly destroyed garden terrace. They don’t need that much in terms of “nice garden beds”.