Recommended general fertilizer for house plants?
9 years ago
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- 9 years ago
- 9 years ago
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Fertilizing bananas (and other fruit trees in general)
Comments (7)Struwwelpeter I can relate. Here in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada the mid to high 70's would be warm this year. Some days have only hit the mid 60's F to low 70's. Despite that, my musa basjoo has finally started growing more, maybe one leaf every week. I think sunny days do make a difference, even if it's cool. Maybe it warms the plant up more. As our soil is very clay-like I amended at planting time with peat moss and composted manure. I have been fertilizing every 10 to 14 days with a mild solution of miracle gro and water, or else a conifer fertilizer that I have (somewhere I read that conifer fertilizer helps prevent petunias from getting yellow so I use that on all the plants once in a while). I usually mix my solution quite a bit milder than the package recommends so maybe this compensates for the more frequent fertilizing. As you probably know, with flowering plants if you fertilize too much you risk getting lots of lush green growth but no blossoms, but with a banana I don't worry as it will likely never bloom in our short summers anyway. So, I like to think I am just trying to do my best, with the less than ideal weather this year, trying to push out as much growth as possible. Glen...See Moregeneral fertilizing question
Comments (9)Thank you guys for your responses. I wasn't able to get a hold of compost this year but I hear you that it's the best thing out there and I hope to get some when I can. I have some plants in containers, but most are in ground. I do know about watering so that it drains out the containers to get rid of excess salts. What about in the ground? I have bananas in a certain area that has rocks as the edges. Every so often I like to flood the area (very rarely) to water deeply and also to get rid of excess salts but here's the thing. There is no outlet for the water, I mean that the water doesn't drain out somewhere, it just soaks into the ground. Does that still get rid of salts or do I have to actually provide a way for the water to drain outside the garden area. Sorry for this silly question. Z...See Moregeneral all-purpose fertilizer recommendation?
Comments (20)"...nobody in the world has ever quantified this...No, nobody in the world has any idea." I don't understand how anyone could make such a claim. I know people that have studied the nutrient needs of various ornamental (non-food crop) trees and plants quite a bit and wrote papers on the subject. I've had conversations with researchers that would take great personal exception with this kind of statement. I could buy a statement like, "we know more about the nutrient needs of some crops than we do of most ornamental plants," but that's a completely different claim. Can I give you figures for specific plants? No, especially not without going back and reading through some of the stuff I've seen. But that doesn't mean the information is not known, and it especially doesn't mean that many people don't have a general idea. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I've seen quite a bit of information about nutrient levels for certain types of trees (nut trees, for instance). ___________________________________ "So now, another definition of a given plant or group of plants "needing" some nutrient is if you add that nutrient, do you get a response? And in that sense, nitrogen is always lacking." I hate to be squeaky cog, or whatever, but in my estimation that would be a really, really, really poor way to define needing. In many cases, adding more nitrogen (and especially adding lots of nitrogen) brings about negative consequences for the plant (lanky weak growth highly susceptible to pests and certain types of disease, for instance). You wouldn't say that an obese person "needed" a big slice of birthday cake after already eating a sufficiently large and well-balanced meal, would you? My most common way of judging whether fertilizer should be applied is by visually assessing whether the plants look like they are in need (not with soil tests), and by that, I don't mean whether a response would be generated! ___________________________________ "Try the Miracle Grow...8-8-8 fertilizer..." Beany, can you give ANY rational basis for such a recommendation?...See MoreGeneric host plants in the Midwest? (or host plants in general)
Comments (9)There is a lot of great information about what plants host what insects on this site: http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info It's not really a guide about which plants to choose, but it's great reading once you've got a specific butterfly or a specific plant in mind. It also gives you some idea of what sort of environment the plants grow in (sun, soil, etc.). Growing in containers might be a challenge for some things that are taprooted like butterfly weed. My guess is that they would be rather short-lived in that situation, so you might have to start some each year to keep them going. One plant that comes to mind is Chamaecrista fasciculata (showy partridge pea). It's an annual that hosts sulfur butterflies. I would think it would do pretty well in pots and you could just make sure that some of the seed pods end up back in your pots at the end of the year....See MoreRelated Professionals
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tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)