One secret that will help your garden to grow more food

For the past 6 years I have been on a mission to learn how to grow a garden like my life depended on it. It was important to me to have a skill set for growing food in a quality and quantity that could feed my family if the necessity ever arose. Four years ago I learned a little secret that has increased the amount of food our garden produces significantly.

The good news here is that you don't need to buy anything for even go check out a book from the library. I am going to include everything here and you will be able to read it in just a few minutes of your time. So what is this big secret and how is it going to change your garden? You aren't feeding your garden properly.

So let me explain. All plants need 16 nutrients to grow, produce fruit and get it to a ripen. Three of those 16, the plant is able to get from the air in the form of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. The remaining 13 it gets through its roots. Nutrients the plants take in through its roots are obtained through osmosis. And here is that secret I mentioned, those nutrients have to be inorganic and water soluble for the plant to be able to absorb them through osmosis! Organic non water soluble minerals cannot penetrate the root membrane to be available to the plant.

So what does that mean? You should examine what your feeding your plants and determine if they're water soluble or not. If you are adding organic materials to your garden they're not going to be available to the plants until after they've composted and become inorganic. Eventually organic matter, such as rabbit manure or egg shells, will break down and become available to the plants. The problem with this is two part. First, we don't know when that process will be complete. It could be a month from now, or a year from now. Secondly, the plant needs those nutrients now.

When having this discussion with people they're adamant their garden is doing well and looks great. They are experiencing "hidden hunger" and not reaching the full potential of their garden. There are just enough nutrients in their garden that the plants aren't showing symptoms of deficiencies. They are producing food, but not as much as they could produce if they had all the nutrition they needed. Just by feeding a garden correctly one could more than double their production.

Think of it this way. A professional body builder has to take in the right nutrients in the correct amounts to build all that muscle. If they were to take in just enough to meet a minimum calorie and nutrient requirements to sustain life they would likely have a well chiseled physique but they just aren't going to build any real mass. If they have six months to prepare for a body building competition but do not start meeting their nutritional and calorie requirements until month 5, how much muscle mass will they produce for that competition? Not much.

Plants are the same way. They need those nutrients from the beginning of their growth all the way up through the ripening of the fruit they produce. If the plant doesn't have the nutrients they need it will not produce as much food. It is just that simple. If you are adding organic material to your garden it just isn't going to produce to its full potential.

Here are a couple pictures from our garden that were taken this week. Our indeterminate tomatoes are 10 feet tall and occupy 16 feet of an 18" wide grow box in our greenhouse. This week we harvested 85 pounds of tomatoes. The second picture is 43 pounds of tomatoes on our kitchen counter. We feed our garden water soluble inorganic nutrients every week.

If you're interested in hearing how we meet those nutritional needs of our garden please let me know by commenting. Happy gardening.

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