Friday, May 8, 2009

Flower Gardening - Fertilizer Friday!

I want to thank my new friend Tootsie over at Tootsie Time for giving us Fertilizer Friday!

Before I ran across Tootsie's way of fertilizing, I was bucket fertilizing all of my flowers once every 2 weeks. That meant filling a 5-gallon bucket with water and Miracle-Gro fertilizer, mixing, stirring and then dumping on the plants, refilling the bucket with water and Miracle-Gro, mixing, stirring and dumping. Repeat. Nine Bazillion Times.

Well, it seemed like it anyway, between the front, side and back yard gardens. Effective, yes. But also very back-breaking. And then sometimes between tracking all of the other chores in the yard & garden, I might miss fertilizing them altogether and get all off of schedule! And then, once the heat gets fired up real good like it does early down here in the Deep South, well I tire of all that haulin' pretty quick like and the flowers suffer for it.

Then I ran across Tootsie's blog, her absolutely gorgeous flowers, and her concept of Fertilizer Friday, and thought, this year I'm gonna try something new.

Instead of bucket watering my flowers every two weeks, I'm using a sprayer with the Miracle-Gro fertilizer and spraying everything down, every single Friday instead. Now I'm not talking about that new fangled Miracle-Gro spray thingy, I'm talkin' a plain, ole sprayer with regular old Miracle-Gro doled out into it, mixed with water and then attached to a hose. That new sprayer is mighty fine for sure, but I'm guessin' that it might also be a bit expensive, don't know for sure. At first, I was concerned that I would go through so much more fertilizer that I wouldn't be able to afford it, but really the sprayer lasts much longer than I thought. In truth, I was probably using more Miracle-Gro with the bucket method anyway. That, and the foliage wasn't benefiting from the Miracle-Gro with bucket watering like it will with a spray.

So, for the first dose of fertilizer to sort of wake everything up this spring, I did a heavier dose of Miracle-Gro and the bucket method, but then after that, I am using the sprayer instead and now, on every Friday.

So, I'm off to fertilize all of my flowers and then sometime this afternoon, hopefully I'll have my post on vertical structures for the veggie gardens that I've been trying to finish, finished!

It's taking me awhile to get all of the photos organized, uploaded and in order, and then the instructions typed up, so bear with me and hopefully I can get that finished up later today. While there are thorough instructions on building vertical structures {and loads of other info if you're trying the square foot method the first time} in the book, I thought I would show y'all what I have done in my garden, so look for that later {I hope}.

2 comments:

  1. All your plants are saying, "TGIF!" Thank God It's Fertilizer!

    I made your recent chicken salad recipe (the one with the grapes and pecans) and everyone LOVED IT.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for lettin' me know!!! It's different for sure, in that southern tea room kinda way LOL!

    ReplyDelete

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