This year, I decided to fertilize all my little fields, vegetable patches, and greenhouses. The biggest one is the newly established, 60 m² field where I run the Three Sisters experiment last year.

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Fertilizing this plot of land will consist of growing legumes this year. An approximately 1,5 m wide strip was sown with green peas, a ca. 4 m wide strip was sown with yellow peas, and the rest was sown with alfalfa. I had to use planks to do it; the ground was extremely wet at the time.

I will harvest the green peas for canning, I will let the yellow peas ripen and dry in situ (if the weather allows it), and I will probably mow the alfalfa once with a scythe, and a second time with the lawn mower. The current plan is to leave most of the biomass in place, and till it under in September. After that, I intend to sow it with spelta.

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The oats started to poke out of the ground, which makes me happy. I did not fertilize this plot at all, but I will do so with lawn fertilizer in due course. The reasoning is that since oats are grass, a lawn fertilizer should be adequate and not harmful.

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For potatoes and fruigetables I bought organic granulated fertilizers that should release the nutrients slowly over the vegetation period. For the potatoes, I just estimated the ammount and I have spread it on the patches before planting the tubers. For tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse, I weighed the amounts more precisely, and at the lower end of the recommendation written on the packaging. In a greenhouse, too much fertilizer is more harmful than outdoors. I will also fertilize the pumpkins and squash patches.

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I watered the greenhouse thoroughly after I applied the fertilizer. I don’t have any tomato plants yet to put there, but I do want to jumpstart the soil biology before planting. And I do have three bell pepper plants that successfully overwintered, and I would like to put them back into the soil asap.