Synthetic Or Organic Fertilizer- What Actually Works

Compost is just organic matter. It's a combination of nitrogen and carbon. We're not opposed to fertilizers. We're opposed to chemical-based, oil-based fertilizers. We want our plants to develop deep root systems. Do your own compost, make your own castings. Gardening becomes much less expensive. Synthetic fertilizer can make plants look better fast, but it doesn't build the soil. It can stress plants and over time it can make your soil harder to manage. I'm Angela from Growing in the Garden and I'm here with Zach from Arizona Worm Farm. Today we're comparing synthetic versus organic fertilizers, what each one actually does in the soil, and which one works best for real results. And we're answering the question most gardeners are guessing at. When to fertilize, how often, and what to use in raised beds and containers so you get results without wrecking your soil. We're thinking about what plants really need and what's best for plants. It really does matter if we use organic versus chemical. And why is that? Explain some of the science behind that. Take a step back first and just say to yourself, what's the luscious most vibrant place I've ever been in? You're probably imagining some rainforest somewhere. Nobody's applying Miracle-Gro. There's no supplemental chemicals that are in that setting. It's just a natural process where the stuff that falls, leaves and branches, and birds that poop, and animals that die, and all that stuff becomes food for the next generation of plants. We're trying to get plants to grow strong healthy roots and healthy bodies from the inside out. And there's things in nature which help make that happen. This is my favorite demonstration. Plants from their roots produce what are called exudates, which are largely sugars. So microbes like sugars. What plants are doing is they're trying to entice microbes to come feed on the sugars that they are producing. What's your favorite candy? I like Kit Kats. They're pretty good. Each of these plants knows that there is a that will feed on Kit Kats. If they need, for example, more boron, they'll produce Kit Kats that attract the microbes that provide boron. How do they know that? It's just a natural process. That is incredible. I've never heard it explained that way. If they need sulfur, they'll produce the sugars, the M&Ms that attract the microbes that will provide them with sulfur. That's incredible. So if we can have a community of microbes working together under the soil, they will provide exactly the nutrients that the plants need to get in order to get strong organic growth. I love the visual of the plant's roots sending out candy to encourage the different micronutrients. If we let it, nature can and will supply exactly what our plants need. So what is the difference between chemical fertilizer and organic fertilizer, and why should I even care? Let's talk about the difference between feeding your plant and feeding your soil. Central Park, there's a popcorn vendor and there's these oversized bloated pigeons because they don't have to do any work at all for their food. They just get this unhealthy carb thing. Well, we don't want bloated park pigeon plants. We want our plants to work for the food that they have to get, and we want them to get nutritious stuff. So when we apply chemical fertilizers or any artificial fertilizer, it passes through the root system and the roots are able to grab what passes by. Scientists tell us 25 to 30 percent of it actually gets absorbed by the plant. That other 65, 70 percent just goes down to pollute our water table, and it's money that you're spending that your plants can't consume. And it's out of balance, and it doesn't force our plants to do the work that we want the plants to do to grow strong and healthy. We want our plants to develop deep root systems, to go after water, to go after nutrients. And if we just hand it to them on a silver platter, they don't do the things that we want them to do to grow strong and healthy. So not only are we spending too much money with chemical fertilizers, not only are we polluting our water table, we're growing inferior quality plants that are much more susceptible to disease and to pests. So are they as nutrient dense? Is that a difference even? In a natural system, everything happens at the root level. All of the microbes that our plants encourage to grow operate at the root levels. You can't have too much. You can't burn your plants. And they provide the density, both the diversity and the density of microbes and minerals that our plants need. Plus, natural systems keep them in balance. Artificial systems tend to be out of balance. So you can have a ton of nitrogen, but not have enough of the other 16 elements that you need to have to have a plant grow successfully. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Right. Those are the big three. There's other things, other nutrients that we call trace micronutrients that we need in smaller amounts. And then we need carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. That's all your plants need. That's it. But they need them in balance. Differences in availability of those nutrients can impact how our plants grow. No matter how much of the other stuff you've got, they'll only grow as much as the thing that has the least. You can have a real tall wine barrel, but if one of the slats is low, you can only fill it up as full as that lowest slat. That makes sense. And so if you were short boron or magnesium or molybdenum, then the plants couldn't, they didn't have enough things to grow correctly. Nature balances that using microbes. When you look at a big, seemingly healthy plant above ground, I wish you could also see what's going on below ground. That excess nitrogen isn't doing anything for the roots or the soil. Ammonia nitrate is one of the more common ways of turning oil into fertilizer. We can get a really big first number and that NPK, sometimes that N number can be 10, 12, 14. That's a lot of nitrogen. And what you'll get is this burst of growth. And you think the plant responds to all of that. All that stuff. And it shoots up and you think, I'm a great gardener. But what you've done is you've created artificial growth. It's not structurally sound. It's more susceptible to disease. Aphids love that kind of growth. So we don't really want to encourage that. What we want to do is encourage a balance. We want plants to protect themselves from the inside out. And we do that by having lots of appropriate enzymes and minerals in our soils to provide that organic natural growth. You get that from compost. If we didn't have HOAs, we probably wouldn't have to add as much compost. But we rake away all our leaves. We rake away all that stuff that in nature... Detritus. We remove all that. We blow it away with our power winds. My neighbors do that every Friday. Get rid of it all. Is it better to just leave the leaves? Yeah. Simple is all that stuff that falls becomes food for the next generation of plants. And if you take it away, you have to replace it somehow. So but when you remove all those leaves, now you have to come here and pay money for compost to put it back. You have to go to Home Depot and buy Miracle-Gro. In nature, all that stuff that falls is part of a cycle that's really a good cycle. It worked before we were here. It'll work after we're here. And us out there with our leaf blowers just disturbs that cycle. We can't go wrong if we're trying to copy nature and use the principles we see there. So we are surrounded by different piles. Tell me about each of the piles and what's going on out here. Kind of the key element, the key basis of our growing in the garden soil and of all the stuff that we do here is compost. Compost is just organic matter. It's a combination of nitrogen and carbon, which are the two things that are the primary principle growers of nutrients. And that's what you're good at doing here is turning food scraps that come to the worm farm into compost. Can we look at the compost? Absolutely. So this is finished compost. Right, so this came to our farm between six and eight months ago. Oh, it's warm. It came as a tree or food waste or horse manure. We stacked it up and we watered it and we babied it, checked its temperature every single day, turned it, and at the end we took it through three heat cycles. The microbes start to consume the organic matter. Temperature will go above 140 degrees. We keep it above 140 degrees for three days. That kills all the weed seeds and pathogens. It'll start to cool down. We use a compost turner to turn it from the bottom up. That exposes fresh organic matter to the microbes and they'll heat up again. We let it go above 140 degrees for three days. We turn it again and we'll take it through three or four heat cycles, depending on the amount of nitrogen in the initial mix. After that, it won't heat up above 140 degrees. It'll heat up 130, 125, and then we just slowly let it cure. What's happening is predominantly the bacteria, helpful bacteria, is converting nitrogen or nitrogen sources into a compound that your plants can absorb. Plants literally suck. They transpire from their leaves, which means they give off water. When they give off water, that creates a vacuum. And that vacuum helps them suck stuff up through their roots. So in order for them to get nutrients, it has to be broken down into a chemical format that they can use. This is too big for a plant to suck up through its roots. So it has to be broken down further. Microbes are the organisms in nature that break this down into a composition that plants' roots can absorb. They're going to take that compost and break it down. Exactly. Converts that compost into food for the plants. Just like your green thumb will develop over time, your soil is doing the same thing. Treat it well and give it what it needs. Back in the day, I would get a soil test and it would show me these micronutrients that were low and I would think, I would go on Amazon and think, OK, I need to buy this. And then there's this, I think, how am I going to adjust all of these things? It's really impossible for me to think about how to do that. But I love that the plants know what they need and send out those signals. One of the challenges is that too little of something can look like too much of something else. OK. And so boron, for example, can lock up nitrogen in interesting ways. So you do a soil test and it says, oh, you're short of boron. You don't need very much. But you add, you go and you buy borax soap and you put some on there. And suddenly your plants aren't growing as well. And it looks like you don't have enough nitrogen. But what's happened is the combination of those chemicals, one has locked up the other. I know it's a sacrilege to say, but we just hate soil testing for most homeowners. I honestly have moved away from that a lot. I feel like, I agree. It gives you a bunch of information that's really hard. It's like, OK, now you know you don't have enough sulfur. Now what? Well, what you do is you plant lots of different plants close together. Square foot gardening is a great way to do this. If you have five or six or seven different kinds of plants, they'll all produce different kinds of exudates. Those exudates will encourage different kinds of microbial growth. The microbes serve as a family to help themselves, a community to grow together and everything gets healthier. There's things we can do called biostimulation. We can add certain kinds of enzymes into our soil to trigger things to happen in the plants that we want. Insect frass, the poop of our black soldier fly larva, for example, high in an enzyme called chitin. Chitin tells your plants that there are pests present when there aren't any. So the plant will protect itself. It'll grow thicker. It thinks there's pests. Exactly. It'll grow a thicker cell wall that makes it harder for the pests. That's interesting. So here's what's going to happen in your neighborhood. The pests are going to come flying around. They're going to come to your plants. They'll go, those are really hard. I'm not attacking these. They'll go to your neighbor who's using Miracle-Gro and has all this abundant growth of really not very sturdy plants. And they'll go pick on your neighbor's plants. So that's what's going to happen. We don't have to become soil scientists. Give your soil what it needs. It will do the rest. All right, so now we've seen the compost. Right. What is this? Okay. Actually, I know what this is. I love this stuff. This is in all of my garden beds. I love it. We've been fine tuning this for six years. That's right. This is about half compost, which is the organic matter. It's going to be converted into the food for our plant. That white stuff, which you can see, is perlite. And perlite's purpose is to provide some aeration in our soil. We also put coco coir in there. Coco coir helps the raised bed mix absorb water. And you would say, well, aren't they working against each other? But you really want both things happening in your soil. You want it to hold water nicely. But you also want it to be able to breathe. Most plants don't like wet feet. So they like their feet to dry out in between. The perlite creates that aeration. We also add 5% worm castings, which adds the microbes that will convert the organic matter into food for the plants. And we add basalt dust for broad mineralization. Because we remember Liebig's Law of the Minimums. We want to make sure that there's enough of the fine things that plants need in order to grow. Regenerative farming, organic farming, your first crop is your worst crop. It'll be very good if you start with this. This gives you a big head start. But the soil will get better and better and better as those microbes develop. So when we come back next year, the perlite's still going to be there. The coco coir is still going to be there. Unless we're filling a new raised bed, we can simply add the compost. Because what'll happen is, you'll actually see your soil level start to decline in your garden. It's plants consuming the compost. So every year, every time before we plant, we replenish it with fresh compost, which is the food for the plants. Trust the process. If you continue to feed your soil with compost and worm castings, it will have what it needs to feed your plants. So what does that look like for the home gardener? When should I use organic fertilizer? When should I just use compost and worm castings? What does that look like? Most home gardeners will have the greatest success if they just raise up the level of their garden before they plant each time. So what that means is, for us here in the fall, in the winter and in the spring, we add about two inches of compost because that's how much our levels drop. If we have worms in the soil, we don't have to do anything. If we don't, we add worm castings. And we generally top that with a little bit of mulch. And that will settle down during the growing season. Next time we have a growing season, we don't remove anything. We just continue to add that sort of lasagna layer, compost, castings if we don't have worms, and then a light layer of mulch. We let the roots, we cut off the plants at the soil, let the roots decompose underground. And that process sets it for the next generation. So you don't have to mix in the compost or anything like that. You're just laying it on top. And so what's happening below the ground? How is that compost working into the soil? The combination of watering, which moves those nutrients down, macro composters like worms that actively aerate our soil, create space for water and for roots, and help move nutrients from the very top layer down to the next layer. And then microbes, micronutrients, which consume that and make it available to plants at the root level. And all that's happening underground. And we don't disturb it because that community of living, breathing organisms, when we dig it up, when we till it, we actually kill them. Fungi, which are a microbe that extend the reach of roots and help the plants get at more water better. They grow in what are called hyphae that are like the joints of your fingers. Now they're tiny. A handful of really good soil can have two or three yards of fungal hyphae. We try not to break them because the longer they get, the deeper they can get at water, the more efficiently they can use the nutrients. And you're spreading that. The nutrients and the water. That's why you're not pulling up those plants. You're cutting them off at soil level. So you're not disturbing that soil. So it gets better at bringing the nutrients down from the top. And we're encouraging the growth of those communities. We're getting more and more microbial life underground. When we bought this farm seven years ago, it was a cotton field. And the way you farm cotton in Arizona is you drench the soil with an herbicide and then you put a genetically modified cotton start in there. It's the only thing that'll grow. For six months, we couldn't even get weeds. We started layering compost, castings, worms, and mulch. By the third year, stuff just grows like crazy. And that's really when gardening gets fun. When you put something in the ground and it thrives. When you put a tomato start in and 60 days later, you have hundreds of pounds of tomatoes. That's when gardening starts to really make sense. And with regenerative farming, with gardening the way we're talking about gardening, your beds just get better and better and better. And gardening gets easier and easier and easier. That's why I've heard you say several times that your first season is not always the best because the soil hasn't had the chance to build up like it will eventually. So it's patience. Yeah. And then just doing those right things over and over. Yeah. Start with good inputs. That helps. Growing in the garden raised bed mix is a good way to start. You'll start with a good one. But then also grow easy stuff. Grow zucchini. Everybody can grow zucchini. So put stuff in the ground. Get some life into the ground. Your first crops can be cover crops. They can be easy stuff. And then as your soil gets better and better, the harder stuff becomes super easy. You wouldn't expect a car to run on empty. Don't do the same thing in your garden. When you see the soil level go down, give it compost and worm castings to fill it back up. We produce about 10,000 cubic yards of compost every year and about 8,000 cubic yards of growing in the garden raised bed mix every year. Wow. So lots and lots of soil. That is a lot. And it goes out in the back of pickup trucks and big delivery trucks. It's in a lot of people's backyards. But it comes into the farm in the form of? We get ground landscape waste from a landscape diversion program from gardeners and from the city of Phoenix. We get horse manures from curated stables because we want to make sure we know what the horses are eating. And then we get food waste. And we layer that like lasagna in piles. We wet it and the microbes go to town, mostly bacteria initially, consuming all that nitrogen and turning it into available nitrogen for plants. So it comes into the farm in one way and it leaves in these trucks in another way, ready to feed. Does that make you so happy to know of all the compost spread throughout the valley in gardens, growing plants, just all of the good things that are happening from this vision? I love it. Yeah. So instead of burying all this stuff in the landfill where it produces pretty toxic greenhouse gases, recapture all those resources and turn it into food for the next generation of plants. I love it. Me too. So not everyone can come to the worm farm. I wish they could. I'm so grateful that we have the worm farm in the Phoenix Valley, truly. But if I need to buy compost from a big box store, if that's my only option, what am I looking for? My first best advice is make your own compost. OK. So if you have a yard, if you have a setting, the best compost you can ever use, even better than ours, is the compost that you make in your own yard with your own inputs. But if you're buying it, you really want to look for a couple of things. You want to look for compost that's ambient temperature, shouldn't feel hot when you pick it up. If it's hot, that means it's still breaking down. It's not finished. Yeah, it's not finished. There shouldn't be any smells. If there's any sort of a smell, it should smell sort of like a forest floor. Sort of a humic smell, but it should smell good. You should smell it and think, oh, this is awesome. Not restroom floor. Not my dog's going to be really excited. Right. Not if it has a urine smell or if it smells acidic, then it's probably not finished. And when you pick it up, it should be a nice combination of small pieces that are fully broken down and then a little bit of mulch, a little bit of carbon. But if you pick it up and it feels like it's mostly wood, then it's probably not great. Not broken down. If you're buying your compost from a big box store, and there's nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of good quality compost in big box stores and in garden centers. Diversify. OK. Get some mushroom compost. Get some horse manure-based compost. Get some food waste-based compost. So a few different inputs. The more, the merrier. OK. The greater diversity, the better performance you're going to get. They all attract different microbes. They all provide different nutrient levels. Don't just pick the one that's the cheapest. That particular day, an assortment. An assortment of different ones. Will work well. Unlike the grocery store, the great part about organic gardening is you'll actually save money, especially when you learn how to make compost and worm castings yourself. And what about worm castings? Can I buy worm castings in the store? Is that, if that's my only option, can I put those work as well? Or is that a, what should I do? A good worm casting is a living, breathing host for living, breathing microorganisms. And they need air and water. If you seal worm castings in a plastic bag, you still get the NPK, which is modest. It's still a manure. Still has some organic matter. Still some organic matter. But it won't have the microbial life. All right. We're not adding life to our soil. We're not adding the microbes, which is the principal benefit of worms and worm castings. We're really not that interested in the NPK because we get that from our organic matter. And that's an expensive way to get NPK, is those bags of worm castings. They're very expensive. Scientifically, the perfect combination is 95% compost and 5% worm castings. So you don't need very much worm castings, which are quite expensive. You need a lot of the organic matter. If you go to your big box store and you open your worm castings and it feels like sand, it's probably not providing the value that you want. I have a bag right here. Should we open it? Sure. Let's do it. Some are better than others. We'll see how good they did, how well they did. They sealed it in there for you good. It's nice and sealed for sure. OK. All right. So what do you think? OK. So it's not terrible because it's not completely dry. So this is relatively fresh. That's a good sign. It's not terrible, but it's not going to give you the same result as the castings that you grow yourself. So spend the money maybe that you would spend on worm castings and buy some worms and make your own worm castings in your garden. 100%. You're just so much better off. Either buy castings from somebody local who's making it where you can actually go and see how they're doing it. Or getting worms and making your own castings. That's absolutely the best. That's definitely a B plus casting. It's really... Yeah. These guys have done a nice job. Nice job. OK. Well, we'll take a B plus. Again, if you open it and it feels like sand, if it's dry, you're just not getting the benefits that you want to get from worm castings. And again, in our opinion, everybody ought to have their own recycling system in their own house. Because then you know food waste got properly recycled. You know you captured all those nutrients and you're putting them back into your own plants. Just like with compost, the best worm castings are going to be the ones that you make yourself. And once you've bought the worms, there's no cost. It's free. Yeah. So it makes gardening more affordable. OK. I agree with that. Compost. Do your own compost. Make your own castings. Keep your own seeds. Gardening becomes much less expensive. Well, then we can create that same circle. OK. So now what about organic fertilizer? I also have some organic fertilizer here. I'd like you to take a look at it and let me know what you think. Let's start with why you would want to add fertilizer. OK. Let's start with... We want to use organic, not inorganic. So we don't want to use chemicals. We want to make the plants work to get at the fertilizer that we provide. And we want fertilizer that's going to hang out at the root level that's not simply passing roots on their way down. So this is a really good combination of organic products that are going to help our plants thrive. Our very first time that we're growing something for really heavy feeders, corn is a good example. It's almost impossible in Arizona and Phoenix to grow good corn without providing some supplemental nutrients. They just need a ton of nitrogen to get those good big ears that we all like. So you're going to have to supplement to make that happen. And in the early stages of having your regenerative process, you need the microbes to convert that organic matter into food. While they're doing that, you can provide supplemental nutrients and it'll work quite well. This is fish meal, bone meal, feather meal. This is all natural stuff. You can buy them individually or you can buy them in a combination. What we're doing is accelerating what would be happening in nature anyway. So we're providing them with organic matter that has been decomposed and is ready to go. For growing things like corn, broccoli, cauliflower, if we need to supplement, we'll supplement with the things that were the inputs to this. Blood meal and bone meal and alfalfa meal. You can buy those independently. It's a little bit less expensive. This combines them all together. Absolutely a really good choice. So this is something that we could add. And I know when I garden in containers, I feel like the nutrients... Right. So let's make a distinction between growing in a large raised bed or in the ground and in containers. The smaller the container, the more you have to play mother nature. And what that means is you need to provide nutrients. Things that would naturally happen in a very large environment, like a big garden or a four by eight raised bed, won't happen as well in a container. In a smaller container. So the smaller the bed or the container that you grow in, the more you're going to want to supplement with an organic fertilizer. Again, we would still recommend an organic fertilizer. We still want blood meal, bone meal, kelp, alfalfa meal. We still want things that are natural that would occur in nature. So the plants still have to do a little bit of work to get the things that they need. We're not opposed to fertilizers. We're opposed to chemical-based, oil-based fertilizers that provide a large amount of, particularly nitrogen is what you usually see. I actually have some chemical fertilizer too. Should we take a look at that? Sure. Okay. So we've got some fertilizer here. And I was actually surprised when I opened this up at the color. I was really surprised that the fertilizer is blue. So we've got these blue crystals that like you say, dissolve easily in water. And let's look at the NPK on here. So 24%. 24, 8, 16. So that's really high in nitrogen. Yeah. You're done. There's just no part of this that I love. When you look at derived from ammonia sulfate, it tells you that it's chemicals. When it has warnings on it about keeping it away from children and handling it carefully and using gloves and those kinds of things make me think that I probably don't want to ingest any part of it. The biggest challenge of this is that it's so much nitrogen that's so readily available that your plants will just, they'll grab what they can grab as it's passing through. The rest of it gets wasted. So you're wasting some money there. When these guys promise grows bigger, more beautiful plants, they're absolutely right. It feeds instantly. And if you're there recommending that you do this once a week, if you're fertilizing with 24% nitrogen once a week, you're going to get gigantic stuff. It just won't necessarily produce a lot of fruit that's of good quality. And it's going to be really susceptible to disease and pests. So maybe short-term gain, long-term health of your garden is going to suffer if we are using chemical fertilizers. Yeah. What would be the one thing people can do to feed their gardens and make sure that those nutrients are going to be available to plants? If they're going to start, they've kind of been maybe addicted or this has been a crutch that they've used in their garden for that beautiful growth. What is the first thing that they can do to kind of break away from that and to start gardening organically? It's as simple as adding an inch or two of organic matter compost with every fresh planting. If you just get in the habit of every time before you plant, summer, spring, fall, however frequently you have crops, refresh your bed, bring it up to level with organic matter and start to learn what organic growth looks like. We don't need long, tall, stringy tomato plants if we're not getting fruit. What we want is healthy tomatoes. I love that. Thank you so much. I love being at the worm farm. Well, thanks for coming. I learn something every time I come. Thank you for coming.