fertilizing

[julibu 0]

Don't know if you'll see this since I'm a day late...(& a dollar short?) but didn't know where to put it!  

I need to add nitrogen to my soil (flower beds).  Blood meal is too darned expensive for all the coverage I need.  I know a grass fertilizer was recommended as an alternative but what numbers am I looking for??  I went to lows & there's nothing resembling bloodmeal numbers.  My choices seem to be higher numbers like 29-0-5.  I was also looking for micronutrients & didn't see much in the bags.  Some had 2% iron.  That's about it.  Is this what I should use?  I've found no cottonseed meal.

[Dsmith74 16]

Well, the numbers are only half of the calculation. You use the number to calculate how heavily to apply the fertilizer. So blood meal (12-0-0) and anhydrous ammonia (82-0-0) will do the same job - it's just a matter of how much you apply to each square inch/foot/yard/mile. So if you use lawn fertilizer as a replacement for blood meal, you would only use about half as much over the same area. 

 

Was there a soil test indicating you need nitrogen? If so, it usually indicates how much you need to add in pounds-per-area. If you could post that number we can figure out how much to apply based on the NPK of the fertilizers available to you. 

[julibu 0]

Yes, the soil test indicated that I needed 3-4.5 pounds of nitrogen per 1,ooo square feet.

[Dsmith74 16]

So let's use 4 lbs/1000 sq. ft. 

 

The NPK numbers indicate the percentage of the product that nutrient represents.

 

Blood meal (12-0-0) is 12% nitrogen (N), meaning for every 100 lbs of blood meal, you get 12 lbs of N. So, to get 4 lbs of N per 1000 sq. ft., you would need to apply 4/0.12=33.3 lbs of blood meal to every 1000 sq. ft. of garden. Yikes!

 

Your 29-0-5 lawn fertilizer is 29% N, so for 4 lbs/1000 sq. ft you would need to apply 4/0.29=13.8 lbs per 1000 sq. ft. of garden. 

 

You would need to consult your spreader's documentation (or do a calibration) to determine what setting to use to get that application rate. However, for me at least, 4 lbs of N per 1000 sq. ft. is a pretty high application rate. I'd worry about burning everything to a crisp, especially using my imprecise hand-held spreader, which is really the only way to apply fertilizer to an entire perennial bed. I'd shoot instead for between 1 and 2 lbs of N/1000 sq. ft. (or between 3 and 6 lbs of lawn fertilizer per 1000 sq. ft.), applied three or four times over the course of several months (or even several seasons). 

 

To be honest, though, I have a small yard, so what I actually do is use slow release organic fertilizer (I like the Epsoma "tone" line) that most closely matches the NPK percentages indicated by the soil test, then apply it by hand to individual plants. That way there's little chance of burning the plants, and I can control fertilization plant-to-plant. So some roses need plenty of fertilizer, and might get several heavier applications. The vigorous Nepeta, on the other hand, is on a strict diet to keep it from exploding into a neighbor-swallowing, leggy mess that needs dividing every month and a half.