Greetings...
Today, I applied bone meal to 72 individual pepper seedling pots.
It occurred to me that there are really scant instructions on how to do this - e.g. how much bone meal to put on a plant, etc.
I thought this thread might be able to serve as a temporary repository of information on applying bonemeal to the early, pre-transplant, gardening effort.
After reading the side of the Bonemeal package and studying up the web, I concluded three main things:
- 1 tsp of bone meal is an appropriate amount of bone meal for a 4" cup
- the phosphates it gives off do not easily penetrate the soil. If the bone meal can be manually worked into the soil a bit, that is probably a good start. Otherwise, a thorough watering-in seems mandatory, followed by a rigorous watering schedule to try to get the stuff it contains to leach out. i have the impression if you let the bone meal sit on top of the dirt and don't actively work to get the phosphates to the roots, the effort can fail.
- all sources say be careful about bone meal touching your plants, but you really don't have that luxury with small nursery pot plants. You can put the bone meal at the side, but when you water it in, it will spread out, and hitting the plant is unavoidable. How bad that is, I guess I'll find out.
Today, I applied bone meal to 72 individual pepper seedling pots.
It occurred to me that there are really scant instructions on how to do this - e.g. how much bone meal to put on a plant, etc.
I thought this thread might be able to serve as a temporary repository of information on applying bonemeal to the early, pre-transplant, gardening effort.
After reading the side of the Bonemeal package and studying up the web, I concluded three main things:
- 1 tsp of bone meal is an appropriate amount of bone meal for a 4" cup
- the phosphates it gives off do not easily penetrate the soil. If the bone meal can be manually worked into the soil a bit, that is probably a good start. Otherwise, a thorough watering-in seems mandatory, followed by a rigorous watering schedule to try to get the stuff it contains to leach out. i have the impression if you let the bone meal sit on top of the dirt and don't actively work to get the phosphates to the roots, the effort can fail.
- all sources say be careful about bone meal touching your plants, but you really don't have that luxury with small nursery pot plants. You can put the bone meal at the side, but when you water it in, it will spread out, and hitting the plant is unavoidable. How bad that is, I guess I'll find out.
