If your garden supplies much of your family's yearly food intake, you'll want to do all you can to maximize your vegetables' nutritional quality. The following potent, correctly balanced fertilizing mix is composed entirely of natural substances. It's less expensive than commercial organic fertilizers, and it's much better for your soil than harsh synthetic chemical mixes. This mix, along with regular additions of compost, will produce incredible results.

Organic components

Seed meals and various kinds of lime are the most important ingredients. These alone will grow a great garden. Seed meals are byproducts of making vegetable oil. They are made from soybeans, flaxseed, sunflowers, cotton seeds, canola and other plants. Different regions of the country have different kinds more readily available. Seed meals are stable and will store for years if kept dry and protected from pests in a metal container with a tight lid.

Lime is ground, natural rock containing large amounts of calcium, and there are three types. Agricultural lime is relatively pure calcium carbonate. Gypsum is calcium sulfate and is included because sulfur is a vital plant nutrient. Dolomite, or dolomitic lime, contains both calcium and magnesium carbonates, usually in more or less equal amounts. If you have to choose one kind, it probably should be dolomite, but you'll get a better result using all three types. These substances are not expensive if bought in large sacks from agricultural suppliers. (Do not use quicklime, burnt lime, hydrated lime or other chemically active "hot" limes.)

If you routinely garden with this homemade fertilizer mix, you won't need to apply additional lime to your garden. The mix is formulated so that it automatically distributes about 50 pounds of lime per 1,000 square feet each year.

Bone meal, phosphate rock or guano (bat or bird manure) all boost the phosphorus level, and phosphate and guano usually are also rich in trace elements. Bone meal is usually available at garden centers. Kelp meal (dried seaweed) has become expensive, but it supplies some things nothing else does -- a complete range of trace minerals plus growth regulators and natural hormones that act like plant vitamins, increasing resistance to stresses.

Guano, rock phosphate and kelp meal may seem costly or difficult to obtain, but they add considerable fortitude to the plants and increase the nutritional content of your vegetables.

Some rock dusts contain a complete range of minor plant nutrients and may be substituted for kelp meal.

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