About Fertilizer and When to Fertilize
Talking about those plants and trees and the roots, we talk about watering the roots. You fertilize, you’re really putting some fertilizer on the trees and bushes themselves.
So when you fertilize, the fertilizer mixtures generally have three numbers. It’s nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. The easy way to remember what those three fertilizer numbers do is up, down, and all around.
The first number is nitrogen, it makes the top of the plant grow. The second number is Phosphorus, it’s responsible for rooting and blooming of the plants. Then the third nutrient is potash, and that helps for stem thickness. It makes it easier for the plant to translocate nutrients up and down. It’s just for general health.
The first two are the most important two ingredients, and so sometimes we have customers come in, especially with the endless summer hydrangeas, ‘my hydrangeas aren’t blooming very well.’
Well a lot of times that plant consumes a huge amount of phosphorus out of the soil because it creates like a one-foot diameter bloom. And when you’re consuming that phosphorus out of the soil, it’s important that we add it back to the soil. So we have one fertilizer called triple superphosphate.
It has a ton of phosphorus in it because we know that’s what that plant is consuming. We want to make sure we’re putting that back in the soil so that plant has the ingredients it needs to continue to make big blooms.
Anything to worry about with those plants out there in the process early? It’s important for them to go dormant. The frost that we worry more about is in the spring, when things are starting to bloom as we start to acclimate into the summer.
But this time of year it’s normal and they’re getting ready to go to sleep anyway and it actually helps them. It’s an important part of the process for shutdown this time of year.
We want it to happen now. We don’t want it to happen in late May after we planted all those fresh annuals and everything else because that’s the beginning of the growing season and that frost will fool the plant or if it’s an annual, can kill the plant because it’s just not built to handle that cold. Our trees and shrubs around the house they’re designed for that dormancy.
You want that dormancy to happen because as the top of the plant goes dormant the root system still grows for four to six weeks. You don’t see the plant growing but it is growing. It’s growing underground and all the new root growth that it develops right now is where the new top growth comes from in the spring. If you don’t have root growth in the fall there’ll be no new top growth in the spring. So it is still doing something, it’s just we don’t visually see it this time of year.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
