I have broccoli, strawberries, spinach, romaine, carrots, spinach, a couple of tomato plants and one bell pepper plant - all looking healthy... still waiting on the pole beans and peas to sprout. Oh, and I got 2 blueberry plants in there and they are doing well.
The squirrels ate 2 of my large broccoli plants, one of the romaines, and 2 of the strwberries though, so I'm bummed about that.
Anyhow, I feel that now is the time to start thinking about fertilizing. All I have at home is some liquid 8-8-8 fertilizer stuff that is to be applied bi-weekly (according to the bottle), but I'm thinking it would be less of a hassle to just side dress with some slow release stuff instead.
The soil was unammended this year. I know I should have, but I never did. I covered the garden I dug out in the fall with a metric crapload of leaves, and then worked them into the soil before planting this year. I'll have plenty of compost for next year though.
Seeing that I have a wide variety of plants, and all in a smaller garden, I'm thinking it would probably be better to use just one fertilizer for all of them in order to keep things simple. With the collection of information that you all share, what do you feel would be the best to use on everything? I was leaning towards using a basic 5-5-5 all-around fertilizer for everything. From my reading it looks like this will provide plenty of goodness to most of the plants, with just a little lacking here and there. I still have coffee grounds to add as well, it seems to help keep the fluffy tailed rodents away from my tomatoes.
Is there anything else you think I should do? Maybe buy a bag of compost to side dress with as well as the 5-5-5? Or should I just use the 8-8-8 liquid stuff twice a month (which would run out pretty quickly).
