How to make organic garden fertilizer

Hello, my name is Katie Rushworth. Today I'm going to show you how to make fertiliser from nettles. Now, nettles have a terrible reputation of being incredibly invasive and things that nobody wants in the garden. However, they can be really beneficial. You can't use them in compost because they will spread that around your garden to feed your plants. You will also get lots of nettles coming up everywhere. But you can make liquid fertiliser out of them and that's what we're going to do today. Now, I have picked all these nettles and in spring the new growth is excellent for this. But first I need to chop them up a little bit smaller to aid the decomposition of them. To do that I'm going to be brutal and use a spade. Now, so far I haven't been stung but we have a bit of a way to go yet. So we want to bruise the stems and the leaves as much as possible and that will just speed the whole process along. You can also use comfrey to do this. Comfrey is an excellent liquid fertiliser but I want one which is high in nitrogen because nitrogen is excellent for foliage plants. Leafy vegetables need high nitrogen content feeds and this is going to give us that. I think that's about it. Now, I'm going to use this lidded bucket, you can use anything but a lid will help enormously because unfortunately this is quite a smelly job. You know that the fertiliser is ready when it smells terrible. Right now this has that fresh green smell, now I've chopped it all up a bit like a freshly cut lawn. I'm going to pack them down and then I have some rainwater which I'm going to just cover the leaves with. This will be a wonderful fertiliser for things like evergreen shrubs, lettuce, cabbage, anything that is grown for its foliage. I think we're just about there. Okay and now I'm going to give them just a little bit of a push down again into the water, submerge them fully and then pop a lid on and that wants to be left somewhere away from the house so you can't smell it and nowhere too sunny. Now this has been here for about four weeks, I'm really quite excited to see what's in it. Well, it's definitely potent and it's definitely green. Look at that, it looks amazing, full of the good stuff. Now I need to drain, sieve all those leftover bits of nettle out. So to do that I have a sieve and I'm just going to pour this through here. Unfortunately because of the weight of the foliage it all tends to be staying at the bottom anyway. Okay, I might just utilise this stick and clear the mesh from the bottom of the sieve. I used to do this kind of thing when I was a kid, making potions, that's what it feels like. You could also use this as a foliar feed, so if you wanted to put it into a spray bottle and spray the foliage of things, that would also work wonderfully. And to put this on my plants and feed my containers, I will be diluting it. One part nettle feed to 10 parts water, but it's a brilliant accelerator for your compost. So if you wanted to put some of this neat undiluted fertiliser directly onto your compost, it would really accelerate the decomposition process, give it a real boost. I think we're almost there. Okay, now where did my, oh it's there, there we have it. So I'm going to take one part of this, dilute it by 10 and feed my vegetables. Free fertiliser made from nettles, wonder stuff. For more how-to videos visit silverlinetools.com.