[music] Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com,
today we have another exciting episode for you! I’m coming at you here from my backyard
garden here in the fall time having a beautiful fall here, things are growing amazingly and
actually this video is spurred on because my plants are doing so well and my vegetables
are so big! Yeah I have a lot of big vegetables including cucumbers. But I thought I’d share
with you guys my three top fertilizers to grow big vegetables, I’ve been growing for
over ten years now, and I’ve been [inaudible ] on a learning and growing process. And I’m
just going to share my top tips with you, you know try to do it real quick style for
you guys that like my shorter videos. Any case, don’t worry, this is not what I’m
using fertilizer, this bag is still unopened. I bought two of these actually on clearance,
and actually one of them got eaten and opened into by a creature and they’re eating it,
which is kind of nasty. But anyways this Organic Choice Organic Fertilizer by Miracle Grow
is not what I use, but I wanted to point out that it says “Grows big, beautiful plants
naturally.” So this is not what I’m using, and you know most fertilizers you go buy in
the store whether it’s organic fertilizer or a synthetic, chemical-based fertilizer,
they’re concerned with three main numbers, and on this one it’s seven, one, two. That’s
the NPK ratios, or the amount of NPK in the fertilizer product. And I want you guys, if
you want to grow big vegetables, you’ve got to just stop looking at those numbers.
They’re not that important for the kind of gardening style that I teach you guys,
I teach you guys organic biologic gardening, that’s very important, right? So we don’t
use this stuff [laughter] and oh, I got it on clearance and what happened was, some animal
got into there and basically what this is derived from are two things: poultry manure
and feather meal. What kind of creature would want to open up a bag and literally eat shit.
It wasn’t me, and hopefully it wasn’t my dog either. So anyways I don’t recommend
necessarily using those things in your garden to grow big vegetables, but what I do recommend
is to add things that are not being put in by bagged fertilizers that you could buy at
your local big box store, right? So let’s go ahead and get into the top three
fertilizers, and what they are, are things that are probably missing in your garden,
because guess what, when your gardens and your soil is missing a nutrient, things don’t
grow as well as they can, right? If we’re not getting all our vitamins and minerals
and protein, we’re not going to be strong as we can, you know? We’re not going to
be as healthy as we can. So I really want you guys to focus on putting things in your
garden that wouldn’t normally be there, such as my top three things, actually. So
number one, we’ll start out with the easy one, you guys all know that compost is critical
for an organic garden, but the fertilizer you need that I’m going to mention is a
type of compost, but it’s not the same compost you could buy at the store normally. You want
to get a fungal-dominated compost. And you’re like “What? Fungal-dominated compost John,
what’s that?” So the fungal-dominated compost is say you just take some wood chips,
you set it in a pile for a couple three years, and basically over time without adding any
nitrogen, it breaks down, basically through mushrooms and through fungi break that down
into a rich, black soil, right? The problem in today’s organic gardening is that most
people add tons of bacterial-based compost, made thermally, but they don’t add the fungal-dominated
compost. This will ensure that you’re not going to grow the largest and hugest biggest
vegetables in your garden, so get some fungal-dominated compost. The brand that I like the most if
you’re not making it yourself is called California Hummus.
Alright so that’s number one, right? Number two thing that’s missing out of your garden
are other microbes besides the fungi. So there’s bacteria and there’s all kinds of different
microbes that live in your soil in just this little teaspoon of soil, or actually this
is probably about a couple of tablespoons here, there’s more microbes in this soil
than there are people on Earth, and that’s insane! So I mean we want to enliven and enrich
our soils with life, right? Chemical farmers and big ag that’s growing conventionally
are trying to kill all the bacteria, kill everything because it could be bad right?
Well in nature there’s always a balance of good and evil, and even in Batman movies
there’s a balance of good and evil, and hopefully usually the good wins. But in nature
also the good bacteria and the forces of good in nature also wins, otherwise we wouldn’t
still be here. And so we want to get and bring in nature’s back into our garden, whether
that means bringing in earthworms, whether that means bringing in other kinds of mychorrizal
fungi and other kinds of beneficial bacteria. And there’s many ways to do this, you could
dig some earthworms up from a farm and then put them in your garden, you could also get
some healthy soil from some healthy forest or a friend who’s a gardener and bring that
into yours to inoculate into your garden. You could also use something like earthworm
castings, that’ll bring a lot of beneficials in. You could also have fertilizers that actually
is high in the beneficial microbes that are pre-inoculated, bring those into your garden.
I have many episodes on this. You could also make something like the compost tea, which
is an easy way to just get some of the beneficials into your garden, into your soil, and then
also on the leaves of your plants, and I like the Boogie Brew compost tea myself, I’ll
also have an upcoming episode hopefully with different microbial inoculants that I use
to add more microbes into my garden, because they’re one of the most important things
that are missing, if you’re using chemicals and pesticides and herbicides and chemical
fertilizers you know, you’re diminishing your microbes. Oh also of course if you’re
using chlorinated water, that may also diminish the microbial life in your soil because after
all, the chlorine is in there to kill the microbes so that we don’t get sick when
we drink or bathe in the water. Alright so that’s number two, the microbes
super-critical, super-important, last thing number three that you need to add into your
garden are the minerals. Not just the NPK, not just 16 to 18 minerals like some gardeners
would teach you guys that the garden needs, but I want to encourage you guys to put 70
to 90 different minerals and trace minerals into your garden. This is super-critical,
super-important, you know people usually get the microbes, they usually miss the fungal-dominated
compost, but they don’t get the minerals. Very critical to grow the biggest crops. When
the plants have a smorgasbord of nutrients and minerals in the soil and the microbes
are digesting those and making them available for the plants, things work better. It’s
like if you’ve been eating a healthy diet, when you’re older, things work better if
you know what I mean, right? So we want our soils to be working optimally, and the products
that I like to use for this are things like the rock dust minerals, and this is the wide
spectrum horticultural grade rock dust, there are many different brand names, Excelerite,
Azomite, [inaudible] rock dust, Cascade, CBD minerals, all kinds of stuff. So get some
rock dust that adds actually into your soil, and then also get some sea minerals, so something
like the Ocean Solution, ocean-grown product that’s in a liquid, something like the [inaudible],
something like the Sea 90, or even just go to your local health food store and get a
real sea salt that’s like dark and grey, that’ll even work to add some minerals,
but you’ve got to dilute it to the proper ratios, one teaspoon to one gallon of water,
and don’t feed more in my opinion than two times a week by doing that, and you want to
foiler spray the minerals on the leaves front, back side and also get it into the soil as
a drench, right? Our plants need sodium, and we need sodium, but the problem is many people
overdo the sodium. And I’ve talked to many of my viewers actually that have killed their
plants by using too much, so that’s why I really prefer the rock dust, which literally
you can’t burn for the most part. Alright, so, oh last thing, of this episode I want
to show you guys when you do these three things, what happens. So let’s head over into the
garden and see. So now I want to show you guys what spawned
this video, my nice large cucumber. Actually just kidding, I’ve still got to walk through
the garden to show you this other cucumber I’m growing. So now I want to show you guys
this vegetable that actually spurred this episode, it’s right here let me go ahead
and harvest this guy, it’s this nice large pepper. No just kidding, let me cut this guy
off here. You’re unattached. Alright let me pull this monster out, look at this guy,
oh my god! This is one giant snake. No this is one giant Armenian cucumber. I’ve never
seen one this large, look at that, it’s huge! This is going to make some delicious
vegetable juice. But yes so you can grow gigantic large fruits and vegetables if you follow
my steps, once again remember fungal-dominated compost, number two add the biology, the microbes
into your soil, and number three, add the rock dust and the trace minerals and you too
can grow super-large cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and other fruits as well.
Hope you guys enjoyed this short episode, if you did hey, please give me a thumbs up
[inaudible] more short episodes in the future, also be sure to click the subscribe button
right down below to be updated and get notified of my future upcoming episodes, and be sure
to check my past episodes, I have over 1100 episodes that’ll teach you guys all aspects
of gardening so that you guys can grow your own food at home, and be sure to share this
video with your friends so that they can start growing some super-huge produce from their
garden too. Once again this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, we’ll see you
next time and until then remember, keep on growing.