Creating a Compost Pit for Your Herb Garden
Whenever you grow plants, you will need a bit of fertilizer. Unless your soil is abundantly rich with minerals (which remember isn't always ideal for herbs), fertilizing your plants and soil is a good way to make sure that they will grow healthy and strong. The time that you dig up your soil is also a good time to mix some fertilizer into it, making sure it gets mixed in well. You will need just a bit of fertilizer for each of the holes you prepared, about half a spade full of fertilizer per hole is a good amount. If you will be mixing your garden soil with enriched soil, though, you should not add fertilizer. Over fertilization can bad for your herbs.
There are many kinds of fertilizers available in the market today. Some are solid chunks that you add to the ground, and some are a liquid solution. As much as possible, get a fertilizer that is organic or without any chemical components. This assures you that these chemicals will not affect your herbs, and in turn affect you. If you tested your soil at a gardening center and the test results had certain requirements on soil treatment, follow these recommendations. Sometimes they will prescribe an inorganic fertilizer for the first few fertilizations in order to balance out a certain property of the soil.
The best kind of fertilizer is home made. This is because you can make sure it's organic, and it's made of recyclable or biodegradable materials. Another bonus to making your own fertilizer is that you get to save the money that you would have spent buying commercial fertilizers. Remember that your garden will need to be fertilized twice during the growing season. If you live in a place where it doesn't snow, and herbs survive the winter, you may have to fertilize your plants even more often. Making your own fertilizer can be a good way for you to save some money, and make sure your plants grow well.
Before going into how to make your own fertilizer, it is important that you understand why fertilizer is needed. When plants grow, they take nutrients from the soil and use these in their growing process. We fertilize our plants in the beginning of the growing season, or during planting in order to give them an extra boost. Think of it like a multivitamin. Properly fertilized herbs will be healthier and will be able to fight off some of the plant diseases much better than if they were left on their own.
In the middle of the growing season, the nutrient levels in the soil are a lot less than what you started with because the plants are slowly depleting it as they grow. Because of this, we add fertilizer to our soil once more in order to help the plant and soil along. It is important that you understand that fertilizer doesn't only help your plants, but it also helps your soil. Gardeners who do not fertilize their plants and soil end up with soil that is no longer good for growing. This takes a few years, but they do notice that their plants are either yielding less or the flavor of the herbs have changed.
This change in taste or yield happens because all organic matter is gone from the soil. It is for this same reason that soil is dug up, turned over, and mixed with fertilizer or enriched soil at the beginning of each growing season (assuming you replant every year.) The process of preparing the soil mixes nutrients into it, and allows you to have a plot good for growing.
