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Organic Garden Fertilizer is Good for Plants and the Environment
Why use organic garden fertilizers? It's common sense. Organic garden fertilizer is good fertilizer -- good for your plants, good for you, and good for the environment.
...read more on organic gardening
Caring for And Planting a Balled in Burlap Christmas Tree
You are welcome to use this article on your website or in your newsletter as long as you reprint it as is, including the contact information at the end. Website URLs must be...read more on organic gardening
How To Plant Potted Roses
It wasn't too long ago that no serious rosarian would even consider having a potted rose on their property except for, maybe, last minute emergencies where they had run out...read more on organic gardening
River birch Trees A Great Tree For The Buckingham Pa Area
River Birch Trees are fairly easy to plant because they are
fairly rugged and durable. Yet to plant or transplant them you
do need to follow some basic guidelines. Two of...read more on organic gardening
Organic Lawn Care
Organic lawn care doesn’t mean you sit back and watch as weeds infiltrate your lawn until dandelion lint covers your sidewalk. Nor does it mean that you need to be out on...read more on organic gardening
In Search Of The Best Gardening Tools
There are different kinds of gardens that require different
kinds of garden tools. There are shops for garden tools that
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Rose Gardening Challenges
Rose gardening can be a challenging exercise but you don't have to be an expert to grow roses. Roses are grown successfully in gardens in nearly every different type of...read more on organic gardening
Proper care of perennials in the garden
Perennials have much to recommend them, including of course
their famed ability to regenerate year after year. After all,
while the longevity of perennials varies from...read more on organic gardening
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A popular topic among the agriculture specialists and home gardeners these days is the furor on organic fertilizer vs. chemical fertilizer.
Now each fertilizer certainly has its pros and their cons, but before we delve in deeper into that, let us first make a few definitions.
What is organic fertilizer?
Organic fertilizers are substances containing nutrients derived from the remains or by-product of an organism. Examples of organic fertilizers are cottonseed meal, blood meal, fish emulsion, and manure and sewage sludge.
Organic fertilizers are naturally rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three major nutrients needed in plant growth. Organic fertilizers depend on microorganisms found in soil to break them down and release the nutrients.
What is chemical fertilizer?
Chemical fertilizers are synthetically produced plant nutrients from inorganic materials. Because they are artificially made, many chemical fertilizers contain acids that can be harmful to the soil's population of microorganisms. In this aspect, chemical fertilizers have the potential to stunt plant growth.
Chemical fertilizer vs. organic fertilizer
Fertilizers are created to target soil nutrient deficiency, which is a prevalent problem among home garden owners. One distinct advantage chemical fertilizers have over organic fertilizers is the fact that they contain all three of the major nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). Organic fertilizers can only either have high content levels of one of these three or have all three nutrients in low levels.
For its part, organic fertilizers are a much cheaper and cost-effective alternative to chemical fertilizers. Any home gardener can create his own brand of organic fertilizer by composting or mixing cow, sheep, or poultry manure with other organic matters. Chemical fertilizers on the other hand will have to be bought from a gardening store or horticulturists.
A noted aspect of organic fertilizer is its slow-release capability. This slow release of nutrients in organic fertilizers can be both beneficial and potentially harmful to plants. Slow release of nutrients means that there is less risk of over-fertilization. However, this could also mean that if the need for immediate supply of nutrients arises, organic fertilizers would not be able to provide the needed supply. In contrast, chemical fertilizers can prove plants with an immediate supply of nutrients when the situation calls for it.
Several chemical fertilizers have high acid content. Acids in chemical fertilizers, like sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid, lead to high soil acidity which would in turn result in the destruction of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the microorganism that plays a key role in supplying a growing plant's nitrogen needs.
Plants certainly do not recognize the difference between organic fertilizers and chemical fertilizers. Their tiny root hairs will absorb those microscopic nutrients, regardless of where they come from or how they were manufactured. But even so, with today's growing environmental concerns, some people debate over the wisdom of using chemical fertilizers as a nutrient source.
Written by:
Gail Metcalf
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