Tour a local treasure: The Evergreen Arboretum and Gardens of Everett will offer docent-led tours at 2 p.m. every Saturday June 28 through Sept. 6, rain or shine. Tours are available by appointment for groups and other days and times. Write contactus@evergreenarboretum.com, call 425-257-8597 or see www.evergreenarboretum.com. Self-guided tour hours are dawn to dusk at 145 Alverson Blvd. off Marine View Drive in Everett.
Gardeners might also tour the arboretum during Everett Gardens of Merit, a self-guided residential tour of gardens from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 28. Tickets are $10 for the event, held in conjunction with the arboretum’s annual plant sale from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., also at the arboretum.
Your plants are what they eat: Don’t feed your plants without considering how rich their food is. Urea, for example, is the fertilizer equivalent of a chocolate bar, a rich food, rich enough so that one cup could kill a rose bush. Near the other extreme might be bone meal, the unbuttered popcorn of fertilizers, providing nourishment but nothing to get fat on.
Whether a fertilizer is organic or synthetic, the label on the bag or carton spells out clearly just how rich it is. Although plants require at least 15 elements for health, three are needed in especially large amounts, and they are nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium.
Take a look at a fertilizer label and you will see three numbers prominently displayed. Those numbers represent the percentages of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, in that order, “NPK” in gardening jargon.
Home testing soil kits can tell you what nutrients your soil needs. Barring a soil test, you could merely replenish your soil with nitrogen each year. Nitrogen is the element needed by plants in greatest amounts, especially in the vegetable garden, and also is the plant food most easily lost from the soil. Besides what you carry off with the harvest, nitrogen can waft off as a gas or be washed through the soil by rain.
Most soils need about two-tenths of a pound of actual nitrogen per 100 square feet to replenish annual losses. For organic feeding, you could use about three pounds of soybean meal (which is 7 percent nitrogen), but this same amount of actual nitrogen could also be supplied by, for example, 2 pounds of 10-10-10 or 1/2 pound of urea (46 percent nitrogen).
The reasons we can often ignore phosphorous and potassium in computing fertilizer needs are threefold. First, many soils contain great reserves of these nutrients. Second, annually enriching a soil with abundant quantities of compost, leaf mold, straw and other organic materials helps release these minerals from the soil. What’s more, these organic materials contain phosphorous and potassium, as well as a slew of other nutrients needed in small but important amounts.
One of the least concentrated plant foods, compost, is also the best. A layer an inch or two inch deep spread over the ground should furnish all the food your plants need for a year. It also supplies bulk for aeration and moisture retention, plus other substances that keep roots happy and healthy.
Herald staff and Associated Press
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