Lalamtx24869 WROTE: >> I am looking for other alternative of miracle grow plant food. Is there anything else out there that is natural as a plant food? If I don't have to buy and pay for it that would be better. Thanks. Here is the deep dark secret and the mystery of compost and compost tea revealed. This might not be common knowledge because no one has figured out how to make a buck out of it yet. Please, for goodness sakes, tell as many people as possible. Its simple, its straightforward, its proven and it actually works on ANY plants, whether they are vegetables or shrubs. If you or someone in your family cuts the grass on your lawn, you can make your own COMPOST and COMPOST TEA to use both as plant food. Apply the compost and "tea" straight out of a watering can every seven to ten days. Obviously, don't try drinking the stuff. To make COMPOST, pile old grass cuttings (clippings) into a pile and as you build up the pile every six or so inches, VERY LIGHTLY sprinkle some water over the top. You want slightly moist, NOT wet. Use some chicken wire to make a cylinder about two feet across to pile the grass cuttings in. Use a garden fork or a pitch fork to turn the entire pile every 7 to 10 days and re-pile it into to chicken wire cylinder. Don't forget to LIGHTLY sprinkle water on every five or six inches over the top of the pile as you re-build it up. The idea is to work the OUTSIDE brown edges into the center of the pile. If you have some egg shells, crush them up into a powder and throw them on top of the pile also. CALCIUM. Its good composting stuff. You will probably notice after a few days the pile may likely give off steam from the heat inside. That is a GOOD THING. If you follow the above instructions, the pile will not smell. After 35 to 40 or so days, at the very bottom of the pile, you'll find rich dark COMPOST. Remove it and using the garden fork, turn the remaining part of the pile and add some new cuttings to it if you want, then re-pile it and also re-sprinkle the rest of the grass cuttings pile. From the compost you have collected, spoon about a fist-full or two of it into an old knee high NON-DYED nylon sock. Tie a string to the sock and suspend it above the bottom in a small two or three gallon pail that is full of ordinary room temperature tap water. Use a small aquarium pump (from Walmart) and a five inch air-stone (from Walmart) to bubble the mixture in the suspended sock for about 12 hours and then remove the sock and toss the mixture in it on the garden soil around your plants. In the brownish liquid that remains in the pail, leave the bubbler air-stone running for another 24 hours. Use clean coffee filters to pour the resultant COMPOST TEA through to filter and apply a couple of ounces of this "tea" directly to the soil around each plant. Its plant food ! Thoroughly clean the bucket, air-stone(s), socks and clear plastic air-hoses in hydrogen peroxide and rinse them in tap water to ready them for the next time around. That is all there is too it. Please don't mystify this simple process. Just tell as many people as possible. Compost tea works.

You can use both. I definitely think the tomatotone is superior, it works a little more slowly, but it includes more trace elements and has soil microorganisms that help the plants take up nutrients.. I use tomatotone in the soil when planting out then add it by scratching it into the soil around the plant as directed every four weeks. But I grow in containers, so I also use a liquid chemical fertilizer once a week through the season. I use Foliage Pro for the chemical feed now. Years ago, I only used MG for tomatoes in my containers, and it was more like famine and feast for my plants. Growing in the ground with good soil, you probably would be better off using only tomatotone.

If you follow the link below, it takes you to the tomato tone contents anaylsis. It shows TT to be a 4 7 10. This is quite a different ratio of Nitrogen in particular from the PT. I've never used Plant Tone, but my guess is with more nitrogen in PT, you will promote more leaf development and growth as opposed to promoting flowering. (This is a guess based on what others have said to similar posts in the past.) FYI, you can order TT on line from Espoma and probably other vendors. Good luck. Here is a link that might be useful: tomato tone

The Schultz product supplies far more P than plants want or can use, which is reason enough not to use it, but it also lacks many important nutrients (Ca, Mg, and several micronutrients), and it gets it's N from urea, which tends to promote coarse growth and long internodes. It really is a poor choice as your 'go to' fertilizer for houseplants. The Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 is a FAR better choice. Even Miracle-Gro 12-4-8 which lacks the same nutrients missing from the Schultz 10-15-10 is a superior choice because the ratio (3:1:2) much more closely mimics the ratio at which your plants actually utilize nutrients. Also, Superthrive = snake oil. The question regarding the value of Superthrive as a miracle tonic for plants is often bandied about in horticultural circles. Over the years, I had read claims that ranged from, “I put it on my plant, which had never bloomed, and it was in full bloom the next day.” to, “It was dead - I put Superthrive on it and the next day it was alive and beautiful, growing better than it ever had before.” I decided to find out for myself. If you look for information on the net, you will probably only find the manufacturer’s claims and anecdotal observations, both so in want of anything that resembles a control. Though my experiments were far from purely scientific, I tried to keep some loose controls in place so that I could make a fair judgment of its value, based my own observations. Here is what I did, what I found, and the conclusions I made about any value the product Superthrive might hold for me. On four separate occasions, I took multiple cuttings of plants in four different genera. In each case the group of cuttings were taken from the same individual plant to reduce genetic variance. The plant materials I used were: Ficus benjamina, (a tropical weeping fig) Luna apiculata (Peruvian myrtle), Chaenorrhinum minus(a dwarf snapdragon), and an unknown variety of Coleus. In each instance, I prepared cuttings from the same plant and inserted them in a very fast, sterile soil. The containers containing half of the cuttings were immersed/soaked in a Superthrive solution of approximately 1/2 tsp per gallon of water to the upper soil line. The other half of the cuttings were watered in with water only. In subsequent waterings, I would water the “Superthrive batch” of cuttings with a solution of 10 drops per gallon and the others with only water. The same fertilizer regimen was followed on both groups of cuttings. In all four instances, the cuttings that I used Superthrive on rooted and showed new growth first. For this reason, it follows that they would naturally exhibit better development, though I could see no difference in overall vitality, once rooted. I can also say that a slightly higher percentage of cuttings rooted that were treated with the Superthrive treatment at the outset. I suspect that is directly related to the effects of the auxin in Superthrive hastening initiation of root primordia before potential vascular connections were destroyed by rot causing organisms. In particular, something I looked for because of my affinity for a compact form in plants was branch (stem) extension. (The writer is a bonsai practitioner.) Though the cuttings treated with Superthrive rooted sooner, they exhibited the same amount of branch extension. In other words, internode length was approximately equal and no difference in leaf size was noted. As a second part to each of my “experiments”, I divided the group of cuttings that had not been treated with Superthrive into two groups. One of the groups remained on the water/fertilizer only program, while the other group was treated to an additional 10 drops of Superthrive in each gallon of fertilizer solution. Again, the fertilizer regimen was the same for both groups. By summer’s end, I could detect no difference in bio-mass or vitality between the two groups of plants. Since I replicated the above experiment in four different trials, using four different plant materials, I am quite comfortable in drawing some conclusions as they apply to me and my growing habits or abilities. First, and based on my observations, I have concluded that Superthrive does hold value for me as a rooting aid, or stimulant if you prefer. I regularly soak the soil, usually overnight, of my newly root-pruned and often bare-rooted repots in a solution of 1/2 tsp Superthrive per gallon of water. Second, and also based on my observations, I no longer bother with its use at any time other than at repotting. No evidence was accumulated through the 4 trials to convince me that Superthrive was of any value as a “tonic” for plants with roots that were beyond the initiation or recovery stage. Interestingly, the first ingredient listed as being beneficial to plants on the Superthrive label is vitamin B-1 (or thiamine). Growing plants are able to synthesize their own vitamin B-1 as do many of the fungi and bacteria having relationships with plant roots, so it's extremely doubtful that vitamin B-1 could be deficient in soils or that a growing plant could exhibit a vitamin B-1 deficiency. Some will note that I used more of the product than suggested on the container. I wanted to see if any unwanted effects surfaced as well as trying to be sure there was ample opportunity for clear delineation between the groups. I suspect that if a more dilute solution was used, the difference between groups would have been even less clear. It might be worth noting that since the product contains the growth regulator (hormone) auxin, its overuse can cause defoliation, at least in dicots. The broad-leaf weed killer Weed-B-Gone and the infamous “Agent Orange“, a defoliant that saw widespread use in Viet Nam, are little more than synthetic auxin. See what Linda Chalker-Scott PhD says about it. Al