Whether you live 45 minutes from the nearest store or within driving distance to three of our garden centers, chances are you appreciate free things. In this particular article, I will share with you at least 7 things you likely have in and around your home that you can use as free (or almost free) natural fertilizers.Happy growing!
Snow
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” It is a song we associate with Christmas. However, this timeless tune becomes a mid-winter mantra for all gardeners. Especially those who live in places with spotty precipitation.
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While snowed in, I sent a link to my new blog to my favorite gardeners and asked for feedback. When it comes to their passion, gardeners are a chatty bunch. Especially when they are snowed in for a few days.
Snow is a free, natural fertilizer
My dear friend Marguerite reminded me that snow is “the poor man’s fertilizer”. It’s a sentiment she’d heard while reading “The Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I thought “free is always great, but what if it doesn’t snow?”
Here in the Blue Ridge, it snows a few times each year. Usually on the weekend that marks Martin Luther King Day (the third week of January) celebrations, and around Groundhog Day (February 2nd). That’s what I’ve observed in the last twenty years.
Snow’s natural nutrients
According to the National Gardening Association website, “Snow helps preserve moisture in the soil during winter and provides water to the soil as it melts in the spring. If the snow keeps the soil from freezing, roots will continue to grow and earthworms and bacteria in the soil continue to turn garden debris into beneficial compost”.
Additionally, snow contains nitrogen and sulfur, in trace amounts. To better use these to your advantage, shovel to areas/beds you might want a little “extra” help.
Using snow melt to determine where fertilizer and other attention is needed
When planning Spring planting, use snow and its melting patterns as a guide. Observe to see where in the yard gets the most or least sunlight, and water in your garden and plan accordingly. These areas may be masked if they cast shade in the early or late part of the day when you aren’t home to observe them, but snowmelt does not lie. It records results for you, despite your work or travel schedule.
Woodash
Sitting by the woodstove for days on end? Disposing of wood ashes regularly? Aside from the cost of your firewood and time sitting by the fire, wood ashes are a by-product of winter that produces free (or almost free) natural fertilizer for your garden.
The pH and natural fertilizers in woodash
The University of Vermont shares that soil there is mostly a “5.5 to 7 {pH}” and that “slightly acidic is ideal for many plants, as this is the range in which most nutrients are available to them. Generally, wood ash is from 25 to 45 percent calcium carbonate, a common liming agent, so you can use twice as many ashes as you would this lime”.
Using woodash to naturally change pH
I’m not sure of the total pH range is for all of Virginia; I’ve experienced alarming acidic/clayey 4.5pH (Scottsville), delicious 6.5pH soil in flood-prone Back Bay, Virginia Beach, and 6.3pH garden soil in a mountain hollow in Afton. In the case of the Scottsville soil, regular application of wood ashes helped the soil become more garden-amenable. My last soil test there read 6.0pH after ten years of organic gardening and steady composting.
How to collect and use woodash
It’s helpful to have a galvanized metal ash bucket if you have a wood stove. Preferably, one with a lid for safe travel from stove-to-destination for when coals are hot. Deposit ashes lightly on top of the garden soil or snow exactly where you want to amend and fertilize the soil. Avoid doing this on a dry or windy day, especially if any of the coals are still live. You probably don’t want to set your yard on fire!
Grass Clippings
As the year progresses, snow recedes and feeds the new grass and early Spring wildflowers. We marvel at how green everything becomes, and then, contemplate (if you are like me) how long we can get away without cutting it. I wait as long as possible. Procrastination gives pollinators a chance to enjoy those same early Spring flowers!
Harvesting grass clippings to use as free fertilizer, power-style
When you finally do cut the grass, consider your options. A self-mulching mower will use those grass clippings to fertilize your lawn instantly and replenish the nitrogen you just cut.
A bagger diverts resources directly to where you want them. A good friend recently bought a battery-powered mower with its own bag. I am jealous. Oh, to easily contain one’s clippings! Having a battery-powered string trimmer by the same company is such a game-changer, I know the mower must be, too. The yard tools are not free, but almost-free are nutrients that fresh and dried grass clippings supply.
Harvesting grass clippings to use as free fertilizer, manually
You can use the trusty rake or harness your children’s youthful energy, and let them rake. Grass clippings are light and dry to a nice brown color. They blend with almost any landscape. The prospect of free fertilizer from mowing efforts makes the task more palatable. I dream of a future devoid of having to mow. I nearly accomplished it once or twice in a few gardens. Admittedly, it took a few years. Years of much labor, mulch, paths, and planting.
Comfrey
Let’s continue with fertilizers that grow in your own yard. The wonderful and simply beautiful plant Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) is seen below as a new transplant in my garden. It was a gift from the aforementioned battery-powered mowing friend, Sherry.
The growth habit of a free natural fertilizer, comfrey
When in bloom, comfrey displays lavender-colored, bell-shaped blossoms. It’s sometimes known as Knitbone, for its historic use of setting broken bones. I appreciate it for its princely purple color, ability to attract honeybees, and its royal attribute as living compost.
Sow comfrey from root divisions or seed, or install in Spring as a young plant so you don’t forget it is there. Not quite free if you do have to buy it. But if you ask around; you’ll probably find a gardener willing to share the abundance that is Symphytum officinale.
Comfrey sports fuzzy, dark green ovate leaves. When fresh, it smells and looks a lot like Borage (which is renowned for its cucumber-like scent). When cut and crushed, it transitions from an odoriferous to a fresh-feces cow-pie scent.
Nutrient and medicinal properties of comfrey
It smells like unfinished compost or bovine poop and also contains similar properties (Namely, it adds nitrogen, a necessity for promoting leaf growth in the garden). Pick and use as fresh leaves, dried leaves, or distill as tea for definite beneficial effects on your garden plants. When in the right spot, it flourishes, and becomes a regular source for your garden fertilizer needs.
Green tip:
Warning: comfrey spreads. Put it in a place where you remember to use it so it doesn’t take over your more delicate plants!
Leaves
Foliage from herbaceous perennials like comfrey are great. Ditto for leaves that arrive later in the season from a multitude of trees. In Fall, many municipalities collect bagged leaves from the curbside for free, as a service to the residents. I see this as a service to the gardeners, too. It’s totally legal to pick up conveniently already-bagged leaves and take them home to enrich your garden.
Best tree leaves to avoid using as a fertilizer
I can’t begin to name all the types of trees that are perfectly safe and beneficial for you to use. It’s easier to tell you which ones to avoid planting under or using as mulch: Black walnut (Juglans nigra) the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), and Eucalyptus (several species names).
Black Walnut is a native tree. Ailanthus is an invasive species. Eucalyptus (several species names) is rare in Virginia. I’ve seen it in a few demo gardens and in front of the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C. In California, it is overplanted and blamed for exacerbating forest fires because of its candle-like properties.
Avoid planting things under these three above-mentioned trees or mulching with their leaves. They contain hormones that are allelopathic to other plants. This means the plant emits a chemical to reduce competition around itself. This makes conditions conducive for more of their own species. That said, there are many other friendly trees and shrubs happy to lend their leaves.
Using deciduous or evergreen leaves and needles strategically to fertilize
Deciduous leaves generally break down faster than evergreen ones, but both work. Pine needles/pine straw are especially recommended for things like strawberry beds, and blueberry patches, helping maintain their acidity needs.
You can do the “slow” approach; take the leaves home, form piles where you want worms to congregate, and build soil for next year’s garden. When you want a more mulchy-type appearance, dump a bag at a time into a 30+ gallon trash can and run a string trimmer in the middle to chop them up. This can be down on the ground too. Doing so makes it easier to contain your efforts so you can put the insta-mulch right where you want it.
Compost and Urine
Two final and free fertilizer sources are things we literally cannot live without. Food and urine. Well, more precisely: we cannot live without occasionally urinating, but…you get my drift.
Let’s talk about composting, our favorite free natural fertilizer
Food scraps likely are in your kitchen now and can be properly composted. Or, you can take a shortcut and directly bury them (at least a foot is recommended) in your garden, if you feel piles are unsightly. It’s not recommended to compost or bury animal bones or byproducts because they attract (ta-dah): OTHER ANIMALS. But if you like digging, you can bury bits here and there, and mulch it so no one is any wiser to your tricks.
Thirty percent of food is wasted (108 billion pounds annually in the United States alone, according to www.usda.gov). I encourage composting, even if it’s just coffee grounds you save and give to gardening friends once a week. EVERY LITTLE BIT HELPS!!!
It’s great to do this at home if you are able, even if you think it’s too complicated, or time-consuming. Slow composting is waaaaaay better than no composting. If I could pay every household in this country a small bonus for composting, I would. That’s how beneficial it is. The older I get, more and more things are uncertain, but composting is an exception. Every year, I’m convinced it’s an even better idea than before.
Yes, let’s go there: if ‘urine’ to free natural fertilizers, you’ll love these!
The purest and most accessible form of fertilizer you likely produce on a “regular” basis (sorry) would be pee. If I shocked you by saying this, my guess is you haven’t potty-trained a toddler. My apologies. Once you have, words like “pee” (and “poo”) take up ample space in your vocabulary.
It’s all good in the end
I don’t have much direct experience using humanure (is what it sounds like) as a fertilizer. I am familiar with common Virginia livestock manures derived from cow, sheep, horse, goat, rabbit, and chicken. Most of these are free available nearby.
Worms and worm bins
Used worm castings are produced in my worm bin, which is the point and product of said bin. It’s a great and free source of fertilizer if you don’t count the minimal cost of worms, bins, and amendments to set it up. If interested in creating a low-cost source of redworms and their castings, I recommend Mary Appelhof’s book “Worms Eat my Garbage”.
Whatever urine to
What I want to end with and bring to your attention is the liquid gold you possess, in the form of urine. Mainly it is water and uric acid. According to https://www.epicgardening.com, “urea is very high in nitrogen, a key ingredient to healthy leafy growth in plants. In addition to being nitrogen-rich, urine also contains dissolved phosphorus that’s immediately available to plants. This makes urine a quick-acting fertilizer.” It’s sterile when released, so if used fresh, is of little danger to most plants unless you subject them to over- “watering.”
Generally, unless camping or hiking, I do not pee outside. It is just not as easy for me to as (say) people that identify as male.
Best-use practices for keeping it free and antural
I’m specific in my urine use: I save it for a day in a bucket in my own bathroom, right before I build a new garden bed. I use it as the base for two reasons: 1. fertilizing properties, and 2.”pre-marking” my territory, so (in theory) the scent lets critters know to leave my plants alone.
When the (undetectable, to me) scent finally disappears, new plantings have a slight head start in a few ways. I don’t use on food crops close to harvest, only when establishing new beds.
And in the end
I know this is shocking for some readers, but consider commercial fertilizer, inorganic produce, and municipal water systems. They may also contain concerning ingredients/inputs. (It depends upon individual locations). If those are all things you’d rather avoid but love gardening, just stick to the first six sources of fertilizers I mentioned above. You still come out ahead!
Experiment on your own and report back your results. All you need to grow beautiful flowers, herbs, fruits, and vegetables are right in your immediate vicinity. Once all the snow melts, of course! (Yellow and otherwise).
*Many thanks Marguerita for the suggestion!