I use MiracleGro-acidic formula, on our blueberry shrubs, every year. This year I am using Schultz's Plant Food, because I could not find MiracleGro on the store shelf. Schultz's is a similar product, you mix it with water, and then irrigate that shrub. I am conservative with fertilizer, I use very little, and I dilute it far beyond the recommendation provided by the manufacturer. For blueberries, I mix one table spoon of fertilizer in four gallons of cold water. Typically, each blueberry shrub gets three applications every year, one in March, April, and May. This is for established shrubs, new plantings get no fertilizer the first season. The shrubs are generally healthy and productive. Maintaining the correct soil pH is another issue, and has little to do with fertilizer. We live in the city of Madison, so it would be more difficult to obtain and apply manure. By using a balanced fertilizer with multiple plant nutrients, I know that the shrubs have what they need for growth and blooming. The flavor of the fruit is very good, and there has never been any odd flavor. There is more to growing blueberries than applying fertilizer, but MiracleGro and Schultz's have both worked for me. Our plants are healthy, and they are also hardy, standing up to winter conditions with little or no loss. Our blueberry patch is now 16 years old.

Everyone want instant, no-effort garden and Miracle Grow promises this. It's not really different than any number of other petroleum based fertilizer products, they just have a great name and marketing plan.

I think of products like Miracle Grow as a sort of gardening crack. The high is never as good as the first one, so you keep coming back looking for it again.

I prefer not to use these kinds of products and instead focus on long term building of soil. But they do work if the goal is produce and produce only.

The only MG product I use is their soluble fertilizer(s), and I don't use them in the gardens or beds - only for containerized plantings, for which they work extremely well.

Al

Improper use of any form of fertilizer is a bad thing to do, it wastes resources getting it from where it was mined/processed/packaged/etc. and then shipped to where you get it. Some nutrients including N and P can end up in water bodies causing ecological problems. If fertilizers are underutilized to produce food and you get a lousy crop then the fertilizers have been largely wasted as have your efforts.

Building healthy soils and the use of those fertilizers in a bag (for lack of a better term)are not mutually exclusive but the goal IS to maintain and develop fertile soils in the long and short run which the bagged stuff doesn't do. If one believes gardening is a, "no effort" endeavor they will be convinced that is isn't by trying it even with Miracle Grow.

Neither the N,P or K in Miracle grow is a petroleum based product BTW, the N comes from natural gas, the P and K are mined.

Is there some sort of value in this product that I'm missing and should look in to?

If it failed to make plants grow, it wouldn't have the market share it enjoys.

Whether you want to 'look into it' is your choice. But your looking into it will have no effect on market share. And echoing michael, if you dump compost tea everywhere and it saturates receiving waters and causes an algal bloom and anoxia, it is a harmful action, organic or no.

Dan

Many people simply do not want to expend the time and energy needed to make the soil they have into the good, healthy soil needed to grow plants that are strong and healthy and buy into the concept (relatively new at that) that you can pour some synthetic food and grow plants that blossom or fruit just as well as those growing in good, healthy soil.
None of the synthetic feretilizers are made using sustainable material and when the basis of those synthetics are depleted and no longer available, or are too expensive. they will be lost and unable to grow the plants they have been.
You are not wrong, Gregg, in practicing gardening that is sustainable, and better uses the reources that Ma Nature provides us to feed the soil and grow healthy plants that will better feed us. It is the people that use unsustainable materials to grow plants that are wrong.