Fertilizing Your Vegetable Garden Too Often Can Backfire—Here’s What Garden Experts Recommend

Key Points

Warm climates need fertilizer every one to two weeks; cooler zones may only need it once per season.

Start with nitrogen-rich fertilizer at transplanting, then switch to phosphorus-rich for better yields.

Too much fertilizer can burn plants or attract pests, so follow instructions and water well after feeding.

It takes a lot of care to get your vegetable garden from seedlings to harvest, especially when it comes to fertilizing the plants throughout their growth cycle. Of course, different types of vegetable plants will require specific kinds of feed at certain times, but it’s good to get a sense of the frequency.

So, how often should you fertilize your veggie garden? We spoke to gardening experts on how to make sure your plants are getting all the nutrients they need to grow healthy produce, but also how not to overdo it, too.

Meet the Expert

Jen McDonald is a certified organic vegetable garden specialist and co-owner of Garden Girls.

How Often to Fertilize Your Vegetable Garden

How often a veggie garden needs fertilizer depends on what you’re growing in the garden and your geographic location. Some areas—and hotter summers—require more fertilization more often.

In Northern California, Lara Hermanson, the co-owner and principal at Farmscape, suggests fertilizing a vegetable garden while turning over your garden for the season.

“We just want to give them a little bit of extra food to support their growth,” she says. “And if we’ve done a good job of amending the garden when we’ve turned it over, we may not fertilize for the rest of the season.”

In Texas, Jen McDonald, a Certified Organic Vegetable Garden Specialist and co-owner of Garden Girls, fertilizes nightshades, like tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, and other veggies in her garden about every week to two weeks.

“Tomatoes, eggplant, okra—they require more nutrients, because they deplete them from the soil quicker,” she says. “If you’re in a warmer growing zone, you typically want to fertilize every week to two weeks during those hot growing seasons.”

When Is the Best Time to Fertilize Your Veggie Garden?

Both experts recommended adding fertilizer when transplanting seedlings into the soil at the beginning of the season. They also noted that nightshades require more fertilizer then, too.

“You can see that a tomato is a bit more of a complex thing to grow, so for our summer nightshade vegetables, we fertilize those when we put them in the ground,” Hermanson says.

Upon transplanting her seedlings, McDonald suggests generally starting off with a nitrogen-rich fertilizer, like blood meal, when transplanting small seedlings into the soil, then adding a leaf mold compost, which is organic matter, to help improve the soil’s health at that time.

“Think of it as your pregnancy vitamin,” McDonald says. “It’s important for vigorous growth and to establish really healthy roots.”

From there, she recommends keeping the plants watered and using a balanced fertilizer until the veggies reach the flowering stage. At this point, they will need a phosphorus-rich fertilizer, like bone meal, to help the plant produce the veggie itself.

The Right Way to Fertilize Your Vegetable Garden

Both McDonald and Hermanson advise home gardeners to always read the instructions on the back of the fertilizer before using and keep track of when you add it to your plants.

“Use as directed, because every fertilizer has a different application,” Hermanson says. “And keep a little note in your calendar of when you fertilize. Because if it says fertilize once a month or two months, you think you’re going to remember, and then you don’t.”

McDonald recommends following up your fertilizer application by watering the plants a healthy amount.

“It sounds almost counterintuitive, because you want the most impact from the fertilizer to go on the roots, but you really do need to drench,” she says. “You need that application to go deep, deep down into the soil, into the roots.”

Hermanson says if you don’t do it properly, the fertilizer could just sit on top of the soil, and do the opposite of helping them grow.

4 Signs You Added Too Much Fertilizer to Your Vegetable Garden

Yellowing, browning or burnt leaves. This could also be a sign you need to add more fertilizer, but you’ve already added some, the plant might be indicating it was too much.

A white, crusty or filmy surface on the soil. It means that the plants aren’t absorbing the fertilizer deep down into the roots, like they should be.

Wilted plants. Also an indicator that there might be too much fertilizer.

Aphid infestation. These tiny pests love to eat nitrogen-rich fertilizer and may show up uninvited if you’ve added too much.

Read the original article on The Spruce