Complete Organic Fertilizer

You may have noticed I removed my organic fertilizer recipe from the website. This was not an error. It was intentional, as through the course of writing my book I ended up consulting with Steve Solomon, the curator of the original recipe I shared from his gardening tome, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades.

For your convenience, here is the updated recipe.

A Word on Sourcing Materials

Here in the Midwest, the most affordable and accessible seed meal is soybean meal. Any seed meal will do, so if you’re in a different region, cottonseed meal may be.your best and easiest option. Choose local seed meal.

Soybean meal I can always find at a local farm supply store, the rest I confess I most often source online and have shipped to us. I’ve updated my Amazon storefront (affiliate link — I make a minor commission off purchases made through this link) to include all the ingredients we source when we mix this up.

We (thank you, John!) recently mixed up a new batch, which usually lasts us a full growing season in our expansive gardens.

Ingredients

Nitrogen:

• 50 lbs (23 kg) soybean meal (or other seed meal)

Calcium:

• 22 pounds (10 kg) agricultural lime
• 10 pounds (4.5 kg) agricultural gypsum

Phosphorus:

• 15 pounds (7 kg) rock phosphate

Potassium:

• 2 pounds (1 kg) potassium sulfate

Trace Elements:

• 6 pounds (3 kg) kelp meal

Optional ingredients as determined by soil test:

• 2 3/4 ounces (78 g) copper (copper sulfate)
• 2 3/4 ounces (78 g) zinc (zinc sulfate)
• 1 1/2 ounces (42.5 g) boron (Solubor)
• 7 ounces (198 g) manganese (manganese sulfate)
• 1 1/2 ounces (42.5 g) molybdenum (sodium molybdate)

Despite Steve’s insistence that all gardens need extra copper and boron, we are not currently adding any of the optional ingredients listed above, and I made a conscious decision in my book to list them as optional. This is the beauty of gardening — taking our own paths across the seasons.

We use a wheelbarrow and alternate the soybean meal and calcium together first, and then lump and mix the smaller proportions together, including the kelp meal, and add them in alternating proportions as well, mixing well with a spade with each addition. The fertilizer keeps indefinitely and we store it in a plastic rubbermaid container in our barn for easy access.