I made my own fertilizer balls out of a mixture of Alfalfa meal, bone meal and fish emulsion over the winter. They look like little hay bales after I chopped them up and dried them. They don’t smell too bad, as I had heard that most home-made ones do, but with all of the heavy rain that we are having they are quickly disintegrating.

I hadn’t put out too many before the last round of storms, but with new spring growth on almost all of my trees now I couldn’t wait any longer. I placed a few on each of my larger plants and one on each small plant. I was astounded to find that this used up almost half of the fertilizer that I made….they have to be replaced every month! I’m beginning to think that I might have too many plants. But better too many than not enough! I can only hope that as they are disintegrating in the heavy rain that the trees are gaining some good nutrients from them.

I also started with a round of liquid fertilizer on all my conifers at the first of the month. Hard to believe that it is already March 2006. I’ve been thinking that I’m going to expand my collection this year….the problem though is that I don’t have any space. I can build more benches in my yard, but then I wont have a yard…I’ll just have a “junk heap” as John Boyce says. I remember a conversation with Tim Kong when I first started…I asked him how he got so many trees, he replied that he had started with one, and just kept getting more year after year. At one point his yard had a lawn and fruit trees, but now it, and one of the neighbors’ yards were filled with trees. So I just have to start scoping out my neighbors’ yards.

No Tags