Best natural fertilizers

Throughout my experience gardening, there are a few things that I have picked up on.  One of the most important ones would be the type of fertilizer to use.  I believe everyone starts thinking about 10-10-10 or Miracle Grow, but are they the best and only ones out there.  The answer is simple, NO!  In fact there are some organic fertilizers that would trump these any day of the week.

The type of fertilizers that I am talking about are manures (cow and poultry), worm castings, and fish fertilizer.  I have done a series on my YouTube channel (aandbfarm) about how well our worm castings work.  I have found that worm castings increased the growth rate of our vegetables exponentially about 3 times faster than the normal growth rate.  As a kid, my family would use poultry manure in our garden to help fertilize our garden.  Our veggies would grow quicker and faster.  One important thing to know about poultry manure is that it needs to be put in the sun to help kill any bacteria that is in it before applying it to your garden.  And finally fish fertilizer.  I have used fish fertilizer a few times and I would rate it up there with the worm castings.  I have seen about the same rate of growth as worm castings.  The only downfall to fish fertilizer is that it's very smelly.

In conclusion, there are more ways to fertilize your garden than just using 10-10-10 or MiracleGro.  By using organic elements like fish manure (fertilizer), worm castings, and poultry manure are ways to fertilize your garden naturally.  Plus they are a healthy alternative to fertilizing and are organic. So go out there and give it a try and see for yourself. 

Happy Gardening.

So its been more than a year since my last post.

Well there has been a lot of changes with A and B Farm in the last year and nine months.  We continued to raise chickens and pigs until the fall of last year.  Then we planted some nectarine and apple trees.  And eventually tried some raised beds.  Everything was working fine until the outer effects of Hurricane Sandy ripped our greenhouse in half.  And then we had family members who got extremely sick, so we had to relocate back to suburbia.  So now we are living in the house we originally lived in when we started our family and it only has half an acre.  This is a big change.

So today's lesson is one that I have found quite interesting and that my wife picked up from one of her friends.  We love pineapples and sometimes pineapples can get quite expensive.  So what is better than buying pineapples, growing them exactly our thoughts as well.  However, we do not live in Hawaii where pineapples are plentiful and grown in fields (not on trees like a lot of people think).  And this is the story of how we are growing a pineapple.

We took the pineapple and cut the top of the pineapple off.  Instead of throwing it away we put it in a bowl of water and let it sit for about a month.  This process allowed the stem of the pineapple to start growing roots (this process is called rooting).  Once the roots were established, we then planted the plant in a pot of soil.  It takes pineapples two years to grow into a full mature fruit.  We have kept our plant outside on our porch so it get the most optimal sunlight to help the growth process, plus natural light is way better than artificial light. 

Now the picture below depicts our pineapple at 6 months of growth since planting in soil.  And make sure your pineapple is fully mature before harvesting due to it can be poisonous if it is consumed.  I hope you did in fact learn something from this post, because learning makes everyday a new adventure.