For ongoing health management of food crops, gardens, and lawns, I generally end up coming back to the same formulas.

Granted, I often do a soil test once a year and use specific products until I have the nutrient ratios balanced and I also play around with refractometers and other fun tools to zero in on the most important products to be using at any given time, but for day to day optimization of health, I often use the same basic recipes. I’ve outlined them below.

All recipes are per 1000 sq ft.

I use a 15L backpack sprayer or pump sprayer for all applications. A watering can works well for smaller soil applications, too. Even a little spray bottle works well for a small amount of foliar spraying.

I mainly do foliar feeding because of it’s efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The main recipe consists of mixing a bunch of really cool products together and spraying them on foliage and soil. I like to stir in the humic acids first in order to tie up the chloramine (or chlorine) in the water.

Basic foliar application (monthly):

  • Activated EM – 80 ml
  • Sea Minerals – 150 ml
  • Liquid Kelp – 20 ml
  • Humic Acids – 5 ml
  • Water – 15 or more litres

More often than not, I will add some or all of the following additional ingredients to the above mixture:

  • Liquid Fish Hydrolysate – 250 ml
  • Organic Blackstrap Molasses – 80 ml
  • Penergetic for Plants – 3 grams

I have recently learned that in order to receive maximum benefit from the sea minerals, it might be a good idea to apply it separately from liquid fish hydrolysate. You can still apply them one right after the other, just not mixed together in the same container. It is a bit more work, but I still do it, if not only 2 or 3 times a year.

Two or three times a year, I add 5 gallons of compost tea to the mix and apply it to the whole property (could drench 1000 sq feet or as much as an acre). And that’s the main recipe. It could also be done just once in the spring, summer, and fall, or it could be done once a week with all of the ingredients divided by four.

Here are some additional recipes.

When initially preparing a bed, in addition to spraying my main recipe and incorporating 6 inches of compost, and possibly sheet mulching, I may incorporate:

  • Glacial Rock Dust – 50-100 lbs
  • Endo/Ectomycorrhizal Fungi – 1/5 lb
  • Calcitic Lime – 5 lbs (generally no more without a soil test)

When planting anything from annuals to trees, I like to make a recipe in a pail and then briefly dip the roots of each plant into it. Here’s a recipe per 4 litres of water, and it can be adjusted accordingly to the size of the pail. I mix the first 3 ingredients in one pail and after dipping the plant, I rub the fungi on separately:

  • Liquid Kelp – 30 ml
  • Sea Minerals – 30 ml
  • Water – 4 litres
  • Endo/Ectomycorrhizal Fungi – 5 ml per plant/15 ml per tree

When preparing to seed vegetables, I soak the seeds overnight in a mixture of kelp and water (5 ml  of kelp per litre of water). The next morning I take them out of the water and mix in a small amount of mycorrhizal fungi powder. I let them dry for a couple of hours to make sowing the seed easier.

Those are my basic recipes. I hope they are helpful. Feel free to let me know if I can improve this list.

Phil