Home-Grown Fertilizer

July's Sustainable Living Tip

Make your own fertilizer from kitchen scraps with a worm bin. Simply feed your worms shredded paper and food waste, then harvest liquid worm tea and solid worm castings. Spray worm tea directly on the leaves of your plants or dilute it one part tea to ten parts water for use every other week when watering. Use worm castings as a top dressing for your soil, or mix one to one with potting soil when starting seeds.

More Facts About Fertilizer

1. Packaged fertilizer is labeled according to the major plant nutrients it provides: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
   
2. Fertilizers may also provide the secondary nutrients calcium, sulfur and magnesium.
3. Beyond the major and secondary nutrients, plants also need micronutrients including boron, chlorine, manganese, iron, zinc, copper, molybdenum and selenium.
4. Home-made fertilizers such as worm castings include not just the major and secondary nutrients, but a wide array of micronutrients.
5. The key to healthy plants is healthy soil. You lose nutrients from your soil each year when you harvest crops. Adding about an inch of compost every year to your soil replenishes the organic matter and many of the nutrients needed to sustain plant growth.
6. Although our planet's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen (more than 78%), it is in a highly stable form that is difficult for plants to use. Nitrogen must be converted (or "fixed") to ammonia before plants can use the nitrogen to create DNA and proteins.
   
7. The nitrogen in synthetic fertilizers is often fixed using natural gas. In the Haber-Bosch process, nitrogen gas from the air (N2) is combined with hydrogen from natural gas to form ammonia (NH3). This ammonia is then oxidized to create various types of synthetic fertilizers.
8. Each year between 3 and 5% of the world's supply of natural gas is consumed to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
9. Nitrogen fixation can also occur naturally without the need for natural gas.
   
10. Natural sources of nitrogen fixation include bacteria and plants in the legume family (clover, beans, alfalfa, lupines and peanuts) that have formed symbiosis with bacteria that fix nitrogen. Cultivating natural nitrogen fixation reduces or eliminates the need for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
11. Until the 1950s, farmers typically purchased fertilizers tailored to their soil needs from small manufacturers within a 100-mile radius.
    
12. In the 1960s, concentrated phosphates began replacing natural phosphate rock as a result of efforts by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Land Grant Colleges to promote higher analysis fertilizers. The idea was to deliver more phosphate to farmers at lower cost, resulting in the centralization of production of phosphate fertilizer.
    
13. By 2005, Florida produced 75% of the phosphate rock mined in the United States, all of which was converted to phosphoric acid to facilitate the production of concentrated phosphate fertilizers.
14. Unlike nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium do not seem capable of being fixed from atmospheric sources. Instead, these elements cycle through a biological process that requires direct replenishment to the soil. Composting yard and kitchen scraps is a sustainable method of returning these vital nutrients to your garden soil.