Best Organic Fertilizers for Gardens and Lawns

Are these really the greatest organic fertilizers you can buy in the world? I think so. And they're about $15 for a 50 pound bag. I'm going to explain how we use them, the different types, so hold on. If you're into gardening, if you're into lawn care, if you're into flowers, you've probably heard a lot of people over the past few years talking about natural ways to improve your soil and to fertilize your gardens naturally. Now I'm talking about products that are readily available at your farm supply center. I go to Tractor Supply. But things like chicken feed, alfalfa pellets, corn byproducts. So we're going to take a look at that and we're going to see how they improve our garden soils, how we can use them as a natural fertilizer. But we also transition that into the lawn as well too. And what products could we possibly use for a lawn fertilizer in the summertime? So this year we'll be doing a bunch of videos on this new Dirt Booster product, which was kind of developed along this line, which is the other important part of your garden, which is the carbon. Adding biochar and really getting it incorporated heavily into your soil. So hit the subscribe button because you don't want to miss this beautiful face. And follow us along this year as we start to explore and do all of our testing. Now this started two years ago. We started all this testing. We've sent off a lot of these samples off to Clemson and had soil tests done. We've been playing with it. But it's not just the actual product, but how you can use that product, how cheap it is, and a few different things like that. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hop in my truck. I'm going to go over to Tractor Supply. I'm going to take my phone with me. I'll shoot it on my phone and I'll just go pick up a few bags of this stuff and we'll take a look. Okay, so it is nasty out. It is 39 degrees. It's raining and I'm going to go to actually Tractor Supply. I'm going to drive over to Tractor Supply and I'm going to pick up some quote unquote organic fertilizers that we can use for our garden. And I'm going to show you some of the differences between them and why it really has become probably the most popular thing in vegetable gardening and flower gardening. So hold on. Man, it is just nasty out here. Let's make sure there's nothing else inside of it. Okay, so here's the pellets and this is the crumble that we want right here. Oh man, my windshield wipers are loud. Turn them off. So if you haven't been to a Tractor Supply lately, I'm going to warn you, you can spend all day in there. What a great store. I love that place. And you always end up buying more crap. So I ended up, for some reason I always love growing grapes, so I ended up buying some dormant plants, some purple seedless and then the Lakemont seedless grapes. I'm going to find a place to plant those on my property. I don't know where, but man, I love that store. If you haven't been to a Tractor Supply in a while, good rainy Sunday afternoon, go to a Tractor Supply, bring your wallet and have some fun. What a great store. So anyways, I picked up a bag of alfalfa pellets, a new bag. They have a different style of the chicken feed, so I'll show you that, and then I'll show you the Dirt Booster and I'll give you a comparison on how you can use all three of those. Okay, so before we go forward, I need to cover three things. What happens during this breakdown process so you understand it, what type of products we like to use, and the biggest improvement you'll make to your garden soil, which is carbon and understanding the role it plays via biochar. So number one, let's talk about how this process works. Any living matter, you put it inside a dirt, bury it, set it on the corner somewhere, it's going to rot. You're going to see this fungus grow on it. It's going to start to break down. Bacteria, fungus starts to grow on it. Well, if we put down the right kind of materials, we're going to get good fungus and we're going to get good bacteria, plus we're going to use, I always use a microbial booster pack that has the good fungus and good bacteria inside of it. That's what we use with the Dirt Booster. As this digestive process happens, a lot of heat is released if you do it in a compost pile, but also all the nutrients. You get all the nutrients, and I mean crazy amount of nutrients. That's why we don't have to use any fertilizers. After years and years, it goes through a process called humification. What's humification? It can only break down so far. It's getting pretty close to pure carbon, and that's where you get that black rich soil, humification. Now, let's talk about the type of materials. The type of materials, you want to avoid anything that's an animal-based or anything that's a dairy-based product. Don't put that into your garden. Don't put it into your piles. I also avoid raw manures. They can bring in bad pathogens. They can bring in bad bacteria. They can bring E. coli. You don't know what's going to happen, so avoid that. You really have to understand what you're doing. If you're going to use meats in your piles, you've got to get up to 130, and you've got to go through that process three times. It's too complicated. So we use, and I love to use things that are grains. What do I mean by grains? I'm talking about corns and wheats and soybeans and anything like that. That's just so clean, and it breaks down so well. So that's why we're using things like chicken feet. If you look at the ingredients, it's corn and soy and wheats and grains. The Dirt Booster product uses a super flaky, dry corn concentrate. It's just beautiful stuff. Everything that we use in alfalfa pellets, we'll be talking about alfalfa pellets. Everything that we use, you can eat. As a human, you can eat as an animal. So it's very, very clean, and we're using that. As that breaks down, typically you'll like a 3-1-2 ratio or something like that on your nutrient release, but man, it just loads up the soil. The only caveat I will give you, the only thing you want to be aware about is read the label and make sure that you don't have disease preventative. Sometimes you'll see for chickens, they make special medicated formulas. So make sure you're not buying a medicated formula. But those are the clean products. Now, let's talk about carbon. The one hour that will change your life, people, and I've said this over and over, there's one hour that will change your life for the next 50 years if you enjoy gardening, lawn care, anything to do with your soil. And it's Gabe's video. It's not my video, but I will put it in the description below. There's a link to a page and I'm going to put it with this video and his video on the same page. Spend the hour and watch Gabe's video. It's the overall complete movement to no tilling soils, to using cover crops, to making sure, he says, carbon is the key to life. Carbon is the key to life. And that's what we talk about. And that's why what we do is we artificially add biochar, which is very, very pure carbon cooked at over 800 degrees through human char in the dirt booster product. We add biochar. It holds onto the nutrients. They cannot leach out of your soil. It provides shelter for your microbes and your fungus. Everything good happens. If you haven't read up on biochar, if you don't know about it, I could spend eight days talking about the benefits of biochar and the proven technology of this. So understand the biochars. Now that's what we do. We add the biochar through human char through this dirt booster product. So let's talk about real quickly how we add this stuff. Can I just add it into my soil? Absolutely. You can take the dirt booster. You can take any of these feeds and you can just mix it into your garden soil. And as the temperatures rise, the microbial action will start and it'll start to actually digest. You don't want to put a huge amount because then you'll start to raise your temperature and damage your plants. However, when I start talking about compost piles, a lot of people get bored because they're thinking about months and months and months. Well, we make super compost in seven days. We take processed manure, or you can use garden soil. We mix in the dirt booster. We spray it with a microbial pack. And in seven days, that pile heats up to 130 degrees. And in seven days, we have super compost that we can take and mix into our garden. That's just super alive, full of tons of nutrients. If you want to learn more about that, that's a little complicated. Go to dirtbooster.com and read all about it and watch those videos. So let's talk about our little menu we have here today. I really prefer things that are sort of of the grain nature. They just have a tendency to break down really nicely, really cleanly. The nitrogen and the nitrogen ratios, carbon to nitrogen ratios are really good in these. So this is chicken feed right here. So the chicken feed, we actually have been putting that during the summertime on our lawns as a organic fertilizer. And it works well. Plus, once it breaks down, what does it turn into? It turns into that humification material. So that means that instead of having crappy clay soil, we're turning our soil dark black little by little. We're also putting the human char on our soil to add carbon. Let's talk about the pellets, alfalfa pellets. Alfalfa pellets will come in a couple different sizes. You're going to have your horse pellets, obviously, which are bigger. These can be broken down into water. You can turn them into a mash if you want. Then you have very, the only thing you want to make sure when you deal with these is make sure that they're not medicated. The same with this. I'll put a link in the description below to the And the same thing for these alfalfa pellets as well. Just be careful that you're not buying something that has medication for certain animals inside of it. I actually like the alfalfa pellets with a mix. So it's alfalfa mixed with other things, but it's hard to find 50 pound bags of that. That's usually for smaller animals. So they make smaller bags of it. I'll see if I can find a link for you guys. And of course the dirt booster. Now, what's interesting about the dirt booster? When you want to mix, when you want to turn this into have an organic breakdown, surface area is the key. So the more surface area you have, the faster it's going to just, boom, it's just going to attack. This stuff will disappear. You'll go through your soil in about five days and you won't see any more of this gold color, golden brown color. It just gets destroyed. It's absolutely wonderful. So that means it's delivering its nutrients fast. It's bringing up that soil microbial activity. It's bringing in the good fungus. That's why the dirt booster product exists. You can really fire up a quick compost pile. You don't have to wait months. You can make great compost in seven days. We show you how using this product and then a booster pack. Now, any of these products can be mixed into your garden soil. You just got to be careful. You want to do it very lightly. You don't want to turn your garden into a compost pile and have it heat up. Because what happens when this stuff actually starts to break down, it produces heat. So you want to be careful. You should do this prior to your planting season, at least one week, so that it has time to not heat up and just go through a gentle process. So those are the basic materials I like. Again, I'll link to them down below. And we'll be using this on our lawn. We'll be using these in our gardens. And the humichar we'll be using both on the lawns and in the gardens. Surprise if it starts to snow during the rest of this video because it is nasty out here. It's in the upper 30s and it started to rain. But I wanted to talk to you real quick about how we work this into our lawn. And a lot of people years ago were laughing at the fact that we were putting chicken feed down on our lawn. But if you watch Gabe's video, which I know you're going to do, you'll understand that our lawn is what? It's a monoculture. And monocultures actually destroy soils. You can never have your soil improve with a monoculture. And that's really what he's talking about. Hey, this year in our gardens, we're going to be planting weeds and grasses and clovers instead of using hay. We're not going to use any more cover hay and wood chips. We're going to just let weeds grow and let other plants grow. But on our lawn, we can't do that. We see a weed and we run out there and pull it up. So the monoculture is horrible for our soil. So how can we replicate what he's talking about? Well, we can take, we certainly can't take horse pellets. God, these things smell so good. We can't take horse pellets and we can't put the horse pellets out on our lawn. Tastes like salty chlorophyll. We can't put horse pellets on our lawn. So what we can use, we want to be careful that something doesn't have a lot of salt in it. We can use chicken feed because the chicken feed is really fine, clumpy material and it spreads really well. So we're going to be doing that this year, but you have to wait until the temperatures come up because of soil microbes. So once the temperatures start to get up in the eighties, we can put the chicken feed down. We'll spray it with super juice and a microbial pack. The same thing we're doing in our garden, bump it all up and we'll have tons of soil microbes. We'll get natural nutrients released into our lawn. Trust me, we've done this. We've done this before and that's the way we're going to do it this summer. That's why we're using these bigger hopper spreaders because this stuff is really light. I mean, a 50 pound bag of this stuff is huge. So we need the bigger hopper spreaders and we're going to put tons of this stuff down on our lawn and we're going to reduce the amount of fertilizers that we use. Yes, we're going to reduce the amount of fertilizers during the summer. We're going to switch over to organic feeding programs for our lawn as well too. Humid char is an absolute key to this program for your gardens and for your lawns. You have to have that biochar to hold onto these nutrients. Once you produce them, you'll never fertilize again. I swear to you, in your vegetable gardens, if you follow this program, you will never use a chemical fertilizer again. We've proved that over and over again and I think that was snow lightning. So I'm going to get the hell out of here. I'm going to go inside. Click subscribe. God don't like this organic stuff. Click subscribe. I'm going inside. Bye.