19 Free Fertilizers For Your Garden (Better Than Store-Bought)

Did you know that homemade fertilizers are better than not only synthetic fertilizers, but also commercial organic fertilizers? And that you can make these beneficial microbe and trace mineral-rich organic homemade fertilizers for pennies, if not free, using ingredients you already have, or can easily generate or grow? 

When you add these organic fertilizer ingredients into your composts and use them to make natural fertilizers, you can completely forgo the purchase of any other fertilizer, synthetic or organic. 

If each time you look at your garden the fact of an ongoing need to buy specific types of fertilizers sits somewhere in the back of your mind, then you’re probably already making these and I should be asking you for more organic fertilizer ingredients to add to our list! Otherwise, I hope you can get something from this list.

Jump straight to the list of free fertilizers.

19 Free Fertilizers You Can Make At Home

This article shares 19 free fertilizers you can make using organic ingredients and local materials you may already have. Between these homemade fertilizers and composts, you have all the essential macronutrients – Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K), micronutrients and trace elements your soil and plants will ever need. 

These free fertilizers give you long-term soil health solutions. This is in stark contrast to synthetic fertilizers that cause soil imbalances over time, and then a dependence on them.

Bagged organic fertilizers are a great stopgap solution for when you are in the process of making your own plant extracts, teas, castings and composts. They let you garden with good quality materials, free of pesticides or herbicides. But as soon as you get your home brews concocting, yours can outdo these. 

Free Natural Fertilizers Are Better Than Commercial Fertilizers

When you’ve utilized indigenous microorganisms (IMOs), your homemade fertilizers, composts and fermented liquid plant extracts are better for your garden than any commercial synthetic or organic fertilizer out there available. 

Better from sustainable and self-sufficiency standpoints, yes, but it is indigenous microorganisms (IMO’s) present from using your own garden plants, weeds and leaves, that makes your homemade concoctions truly special.

Indigenous microorganisms (IMOs) are friendly microbes naturally present in your soil. They include bacteria, fungi, algae, archaea and protozoa. Because they are already adapted to your climate and soil conditions, fertilizing with your IMOs helps your garden in various ways:

• Promote healthy nutrient cycles.
• Release nutrients for your plants to uptake.
• Improve soil structure, aeration and water retention.
• IMOs duke it out with harmful organisms present in your soil. This means they add to your organic garden’s natural defense system against aphids and other pests. 
• IMOs are friends with plants. They don’t just know your soil. They know your plants. For example, mycorrhizal fungi will work with plant roots to improve their water and nutrient uptake capabilities.

The more IMOs in your soil, the better. You support your soil’s populations by feeding them microbe-rich homemade fertilizers. The key factor in allowing your own solutions to have IMOs in them is to use your garden’s materials to make it. 

Free Fertilizers To Make For Your Home Gardening

These four ways are how we fertilize everything.

Plant Teas

Nutrient-rich plant teas can be made in any size liquid container. Anything from 5-gallon plastic buckets to 32-gallon trash bins with lid work perfect. Then you just need water and a few handfuls of finished compost.

This one is the most easy and free method for making these organic fertilizers.

In the “Weeds” free fertilizer section below I share the step-by-step directions on how we make it.

This bin here has a million mosquito larva in it. I’m about to repurpose this bin and replace it with a proper lidded bin.

Composts – Indoors or Outdoors

While a simple outdoor pile works and is truly free, more complex piles (but still simple) like outdoor piles that run aeration through them with PVC or the various compost bin types available to help give you the finished product faster, and from within your home if you need an indoor composting solution. 

For example, bokashi bins and indoor aerobic speed composters are both small investments that will help you make fast, nutrient-rich organic inputs for your garden, right from within your home. 

If you have the materials, you can make your own bokashi bin or indoor composter.

Our primary composting bins are the 32-gallon black trash bins. You’ve likely seen these on Youtube. They work great. They’re the ones with the holes drilled down the sides and on the bottom. These may even be considered “speed composters” because they give you the compost fast.

These trash bin composters are better with the holes on the bottom, but some people prefer to keep the juice. A valve put into the bottom like on a bokashi bin might be the best of both, but for an aerated compost, it’s not good to let that juice buildup.

Warning about the bins: One thing to keep in mind is to keep these outdoor compost bins away from valuable, delicate trees that could be affected by the compost nutrients. We had a situation where Rainy Season came in with a few big storms. These took a dry season’s worth of compost ingredients and juiced them into the ground for the roots of these two trees. These trees are/were “mothers”. Ling air layered them each year for producing new plants to sell at her shop. The most valuable of the two seems to be dead. 

The curry tree next to it survived. Luckily, new growth has emerged from damage you can see. We had a single 32-gallon compost bin right in the middle of these 2 trees.

Vermicomposting

Producing castings from red wigglers is extremely easy to do. I did the 3-bucket worm casting system at first. It worked, but the worms overheated. Our worms are now big and healthy in open, shorter bins. Here are our current 2 worm bins hard and happily at work.

For as little as I try to use plastic, I haven’t found alternatives yet for composting and worm castings. I do plan to find alternatives to these plastic bins. Large clay bins could be good. A bathtub would also be good. 

Here’s the 3-bin worm composter I first started with:

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Fermented Liquid Plant Extracts

You can ferment plants and organic materials to extract their nutrients, enzymes and beneficial microorganisms. These fermented extracts are not truly free if you consider the cost of brown sugar or molasses needed to make them (molasses can be found at better prices wholesale). 

Honey works, but unless you produce your own it’s more expensive. 

But if you have some extra brown sugar in the cupboard, you can make some extremely high quality fertilizers in fermented plant juice (FPJ) or even fermented fruit juice (FFJ) which uses only fruit. (using only fruit). 

Natural farming fertilizers give you highly nutritious plant extracts using your own ingredients, produce and materials. These KNF liquid ferments are as good as it gets. These are worth the brown sugar cost for home gardening. But there must be a way to make it so you don’t have to rely on buying sugar. Perhaps honey from beekeeping, or a specific number of Sugar Cane plants that you’d need to grow to make X amount of brown sugar for your fermentations.

Note, some say if you’re making FPJ for your edible crops, it would be best to use edible plants for its ingredients (even better if it’s from much of the same crop it will fertilize)

List Of 19 Fertilizers You Can Make At Home For Free!

The organic fertilizer ingredients and materials on this list can be used to make various types of composts and liquid plant extracts for your vegetable, herb and flower gardens.

1. Kitchen Scraps

Compost kitchen scraps to create a nutrient-rich free fertilizer. 

Anyone can compost kitchen scraps. From burying them in an in-ground compost pile to dropping some into your worm or compost bins. You can even make fertilizer from kitchen scraps indoors by using a bokashi bin or a specialized indoor composter (still aerobic too). 

Depending on nutrient-content, some foods are better for making fertilizer than others. You can also use this information to create nutrient-specific fertilizers. 

For example, potato peels are rich in Potassium followed by decent amounts of Phosphorus. So if you are looking to use a phosphate fertilizer, make potato peels, as well as other high-phosphorus food scraps like pumpkin seeds or nuts, beans, lentils, etc. featured ingredients of your compost bin. You can even create smaller bins for these specific-nutrient-type fertilizers. 

Here are some of the best kitchen scraps to use:

• Allium vegetables of all sorts.
• Carrot peels – potassium.
• Used coffee grounds – slightly acidic, more on these below.
• Potato peels.
• Root vegetables.
• Lettuces and leafy greens.
• Bones – more below.
• Meat scraps
• Egg shells – more on these below.
• Citrus rinds – bore on their composting controversy below.

There is controversy over citrus peels used for composting. Their acidity lowers compost pH, increasing its overall acidity. If this is the case then they could lead to rank smelling compost due to the loss of beneficial microorganisms from the acidity levels. Anaerobic microorganisms in the case would start taking control. And you’d know it from the nasty-smelling parts of your compost.

Not all is lost if this has happened to you. Just balance things out with alkaline or more neutral materials (wood ash, biochar, composted manure) or kitchen scraps (crushed egg shells, melon rind, nut shells, bread). This will get your compost up to an ideal pH level 6 or 7. We’ve never had any issues with composting citrus rinds.

If you are balcony or rooftop gardening, the necessary “browns” (carbon ingredients) you need for composting these organic fertilizer ingredients can come from cardboard and paper. Additionally, local forums or FB groups from your area could help you find people giving away their brown materials if you need more. 

2. Blood

Blood is a high nitrogen option. Blood meal is how it’s usually purchased from slaughterhouses. Often packaged with bone meal due to its high phosphorus content that pairs with blood’s nitrogen. Blood can be mixed with water directly (ie if you’ve just slaughtered a chicken). It should be used with caution due to the high nitrogen content. 

3. Bones

Bones can be made into a high-phosphorus fertilizer by cooking and grinding any animal bones you have into a fine powder. This fine powder is called bone meal. It’s a great source of phosphorus, as well as calcium and other essential minerals.

Water-Soluble Calcium Phosphate (WCP) is a bone extract that will feed your soil calcium as well as phosphate. It uses bone meal alongside egg shells. That’s the only difference between WCA (water soluble calcium) and WCP. 

• This video by PureKNF Dr. Drake is a great resource for making KNF phosphate solution WCP, and his channel is good for anything else KNF. 

4. Coffee Grounds

Coffee grounds are a good source of nitrogen, but also contain smaller amounts of phosphorus and potassium, as well as other nutrients like magnesium and sulfur. To get the most of coffee grounds, you need to unlock their nutrients before using them in the garden. 

Composting coffee grounds is one way to unlock their nitrogen. Some say it’s best to not include the filter papers in the compost (Side note: have you ever used organic muslin clothes for brewing coffee?).

Make sure your coffee beans are truly organic, otherwise you can bring pesticides into your compost through them.

5. Egg Shells

Egg shells offer a free Calcium fertilizer option. Calcium plays important cell signaling roles in plants and helps them grow strong. You need to crush egg shells to make them bioavailable. 

If you’re feeding worms or making an eggshell-containing KNF input like you’ll need finely powdered egg shells. This can be done electrically or via a mortar and pestle. 

There’s a number of ways to apply eggshell fertilizer. 

• Directly as a powder 
• Add them to your compost to ensure it is rich in calcium – As a compost ingredient, a simple crush will get them small enough to decompose with the rest of the compost materials.
• Make a calcium extract – Water-Soluble Calcium (WCA) is a calcium-rich liquid fertilizer that can be made from eggshells.

Crops that are heavy calcium-suckers, or that have high calcium requirements, include: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers among others.

Personal note: These days (and every single day of the worldwide show) I do my best not to wear a face mask, but in the case of pulverizing eggshells, you may want to cover your nose and mouth when doing so, regardless of the method you use. The powder floats up in to your face very easily.

For smoky season here I use a 3M gas mask that covers the mouth and nose only. This thing is what I put on when I pulverize egg shells.

6. Fish

Fish is an ideal source of amino acids, protein building blocks plants require for proper growth. As well as phosphorus. The easiest way to utilize fish nutrients in your garden is to bury them around your garden beds. To speed up the decomposition process, you can grind them up before burying them.

The best fish fertilizer you can make from fish is a KNF solution called, Fish Amino Acid (FAA). You can use a whole fish or any pieces as you have them. No grinding required. You ferment fish in sugar and water and use the decomposition process to obtain the potent, fish extract fertilizer that is rich in amino acids.

7. Different “Waters”

The following “fertilizer waters” are best used in conjunction with more full or complete fertilizers. These waters have been said to lead to salt buildup if not diluted. For this reason I dilute all of these waters with water at a 1:1 ratio at the least. 

• Vegetable Broth-Water – Best diluted at a 1:1 ratio, 1-part veggie broth to 1-part water.
• Banana Peel-Water –  has phosphorus to helps plants grow. This one’s best diluted at a ratio up to 1-part banana peel water to 10-parts water.
• Hard Boiled Eggs-Water – 1:1 ratio dilution.
• Beer With Water – a free foliar fertilizer that can help make your indoor potted plant leaves shine more.
• Rice Water – Soaked or from boiled rice. Boiled rice water is said to have more nutrients. Rice water is a free fertilizer that contains a minimal amount of NPK nutrients, micronutrients as well as a minute amount of plant growth hormone, which your plants will use. Rice water fertilizer’s special-factor is its starch content, which grows and feeds your soil’s beneficial microorganisms, which in turn feed the soil’s mycorrhizal fungi. Rice water is also touted as a pest repellant and a disease suppressor. Thanks to growing your beneficial microorganisms, rice water helps with plant diseases such as root rot. 
• Water storage tank – you can build a concrete storage tank or dig one, and then put fish in it. The fish poop adds nutrients to the water. That’s a free fertilizer plus additional organic matter your soil will thank you for from the fish waste! 

8. Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulfate)

If you have some epsom salt in the cupboard already, and need a quick source of magnesium or sulfur, essential plant nutrients, then Epsom Salt can save the day. Epsom salt is good for plants prone to magnesium deficiencies like tomatoes and pepper plants. Roses like magnesium and sulfur. As do lime trees, orange trees and potatoes.

To apply epsom salt as fertilizer, the general recommendation is one tablespoon per gallon of water. 

This can be applied as a soil application, as well as used through a spray bottle as a foliar spray on plants that like magnesium fertilizer sprays, such as roses, philodendrons, rhododendrons, magnolia and citrus trees, pepper and potato plants, among many others.

9. Tree Logs, Branches, Wood Chips & Hugelkultur Beds!

Tree logs support your beneficial microorganism populations and provide carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace elements. As a tree log decomposes, it slowly releases these nutrients into the soil. A great use of tree logs for easy and free fertilization is through Hugelkultur beds. These provide you with years of free slow-release fertilization. And they do the fertilizing for you! 

With Hugelkultur beds, the process boils down to trenching out a garden bed section before adding in tree logs, branches, leaves, other organic materials followed by compost and the original 1-2 foot depth trench’s worth of soil previously dug out. 

You don’t need as much fertilization with Hugelkultur beds once those tree materials start to decay. Because of how slow the tree branches, logs and sticks buried inside decompose, you’ll need more in the interim. These slowly release essential nutrients over time, giving Hugelkultur garden beds free built-in fertilizer once they get going, for several years.

Get free fertilization with Hugelkultur plant pots, too! 

It’s worth noting, decaying wood adds to the overall nutrition available for your plants. Fresh wood contains volatile oils toxic to soil microbes and plants. It also creates nitrogen deficiencies. Letting wood decay first, at least halfway, helps it not take the attention of the microbes when you apply it into your beds via chips for example. 

Upon looking I see that Hugelkultur recommendations usually say to use aged branches and wood. This makes sense because fresh branches could give you pest, nitrogen and volatile oil release issues. 

If you have fresh branches or chips in a bed, then application of organic homemade compost, natural fertilizers and mulches during this period will balance the nitrogen out for the plants while the tree materials get to decaying.

Aged wood chips are a good mulch or soil mixture ingredient. Local tree trimming companies could potentially be a source of free wood chips and chunks. These can work as great soil-retaining mulches.

10. Wood Ash 

Outside of their slow-release gold for your garden to consume, and the fact that they improve your soil’s aeration, water retention and overall structure, trees also can be turned into a useful resource in wood ash. 

Wood ash, especially hardwood ash, is a great nutrient source for the garden. It contains calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and many other micronutrients. If you have acidic soil, wood ash can help increase the pH. It’s very effective and should be used carefully and sparingly.

To apply wood ash, spread it on your soil’s surface. Acid loving plants like blueberries, cranberries and other fruit trees would like wood ash best. 

11. Tree Leaves 

Leaves are packed in mineral content and more. Leaves are free fertilizer that drop in fall for us naturally. God’s Earth is truly an amazing creation. You see this time and time again in the world of gardening, from observing nature to when learning about plant roots and soil. It’s all perfectly designed. Making your own fertilizers feels more in line with nature and with what is the right way to do it, as compared to growing beautiful veggies using fertilizers that came from plastic bags.

Back to tree leaves… Bamboo leaves are extremely high in nutrition. Any bio-dynamic accumulating trees would give you great leaves to use. I’d search your area to see what trees are local to you. Perhaps your local park (eh, gov. park will 100% be sprayed with herbicides, so you’d have to snatch them straight off the tree unless their vector control sprays get up to tree leaves too).

A few biodynamic accumulating trees:

• Acacia
• Black locust
• Moringa trees

12. Weeds

Grass is high in nitrogen and silica, but if you’re worried about seed heads (which also contain nutrients), use with your weeds to make some stinky, swampy, weed-water “tea”. A great free fertilizer.

To make the plant weeds tea fertilizer, you’ll need a bucket that can be lidded. A 5 gallon bucket with lid works great. 

Then you fill the bucket with “weeds”, i.e. native plants competing with your garden plants. However, just like with kitchen scraps, not all weeds are the same.

The best weeds for making fertilizer are dynamic accumulators. These weeds gather more nutrients through their special root systems, and are among the best options for making homemade fertilizer from weeds: Borage, Dandelions, Lupines and Nettles are mineral-rich dynamic accumulator “weeds”, perfect for making a high-quality free fertilizer.

There are many good weed options that don’t have a deep taproot, yet still accumulate a lot of nutrients. 

Some have different types of amazing root systems, such as Plantain plants. They have shallow fibrous roots that let them grow on hard dirt. Clover’s “branching” roots form nutrient-storing nodules on them.

Other weeds that provide a lot of nutrients, good for making free fertilizers from: Chickweed, Lamb’s Quarters, Plantain, Purslain and Thistle plants.

Here is a bulleted How To on this plant tea (with any sized bucket):

• Fill a plastic bucket halfway with water.
• Fill it with weeds and submerge them, leaving it 85% full.
• Choose dynamic accumulators if possible.
• Add a cup or so of finished compost or leaf mold
• Stir it all together, put a lid on.
• Let sit in the sun for at least 1-week.
• After this time, use it at a ratio of 1:10 with water when watering your garden.
• Note, If you’ve managed to build a mosquito factory, it’s OK. You can still use this water. A proper fitting lid will solve this issue. 

13. Garden Plants

Just like with weeds, there are better and worse crops to make fertilizer from. These plants are wonderful for making free fertilizers out of: Alfalfa, Comfrey, Yarrow, Mustard greens, Chives, Daikon radish, and Sunflower. All of these are considered accumulating plants.

But there are many cultivated garden plants full of nutrients, and perfect for making free fertilizers from, that are not considered as these special accumulating type of plants.

Between all of them, these plants offer the full range of macronutrients, micronutrients and trace elements.

These other great crops to use for making fertilizer include, Banana plant, Kale, Spinach, Swiss chard, Rhubarb, and really, anything else you grow in your garden. 

Did you know a full grown, tall banana tree is not a tree, but actually a “banana plant”? Banana plants are a wonder for organic gardening, especially if you have chickens. If you can grow it in your region, it’s good for chicken feed and for making FPJ. 

More garden plants great for making fertilizer with:

• Morning glory
• Artemisia wormwood
• Basil 
• Vetiver grass: If you need to stabilize soil on an embankment or around a pond, vetiver grass’s deep roots can help with that while providing nutrient-rich blades of grass. It has all of NPK plus more (calcium, magnesium, trace elements).
• Dandelion
• Seaweed
• Any leafy greens or weeds without seeds
• Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)

Comfrey is a great mulch for your garden beds because its nutrient-rich leaves breakdown quickly. 

This mulch would be considered a free slow-release fertilizer with its N-P-K nutrients, plus calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese among other trace elements.

Comfrey is a biodynamic accumulator. It has a “tap root” that goes down deep to get nutrients other plants cannot access.

This makes it an extremely nutrient-rich plant, especially when grown in-ground. It’s also full of medicinal qualities for man.

14. Grass Clippings

You may have to mow someone’s lawn for free in order to attain grass clippings without trading any legal tender, but then again, maybe you should not use grass clippings if you don’t have any you know are 100% free of herbicides.

It’s amazing to me how the average person today is still buying Roundup. And how Roundup now has many different glyphosate-varieties for sale at most big box stores. 

If you have a lawn to mow, save grass clippings off to the side and let them dry out for a few days (until they’re dry and crispy) before throwing them back onto your grass as a nutritious mulch that will protect and nourish your grass.

15. Worm Castings (Vermicompost)

Worm castings are considered to have a low NPK-ratio. However, their lower amount of all the nutrients your soil needs: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, trace minerals – is easily absorbed or up-taken by plant roots because of the beneficial microbes present in worm castings. 

To use as a free fertilizer, apply castings on top of your soil or mix it in with your soil and your potting mixes. 

You can also brew worm castings to make “worm tea”, another nutritious solution that’s easy to make and free.

The advantages that worm tea provide are additional microbes and even faster absorption of nutrients by plants (vs solid worm castings).

16. Animal Manures

Have chickens? Gerbels? Unless it’s from rabbits, a minimum of 6-months aging time is needed for manure. Chicken manure is a great free fertilizer you have at your disposal if you raise chickens.

Their manure will add nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

On a natural farming note, in Thailand, their natural farming which is very similar to Korean Natural Farming, does use animal manures.

KNF doesn’t use animal manures. The reason is to avoid introducing potential bacterias, pathogens or nutrient buildup issues that’d lead to garden soil imbalances. KNF gives you all the nutrients needed using non-animal manures.

We use manures, however I like the way of KNF – upcycling kitchen scraps and using local materials to create all the nitrogen and soil nutrients you need sans manures.

Permaculture does not avoid animal manures. It uses each type differently, as cow, chicken, sheep and horse manures, for example, all have different nutrient profiles.

17. Urea (Urine)

Human urine is a great source of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The moment it comes out, urine is sterile. This fresh urine is good to use on the garden. However, anything past a few hours old (I think the official time is at 6 hours) is best avoided.

Urine has a nitrogen building effect that makes it dangerous to use on your plants. Some people say urine can be good for up to 24 hours. However, after burning a whole section of a garden bed after using days old urine, I now only will use it if it is fresh. Peeing in our watering cans has become part of our morning sunshine routine that occurs first thing after waking up, before the morning watering duties!

Just remember, you have to use it fresh and at the right ratio in order not to burn your plant’s roots. A safe ratio to apply human urine fertilizer is 1:15. One-part fresh urine to 15-parts water. You can use 1:10 ratio too as this is a common recommendation for liquid fertilizer from human pee. For potted plants, use a ratio of 1:50 to dilute it more for these in pots.

If you have a compost pile too high in carbon, you can use urine to balance it out. It should be fresh urine for this purpose too (within 24 hours), as older-than-a-day urine will no longer have enough nitrogen to make it an effective carbon-balancer.

Note: Use urine to mark your territory from wild dogs or other garden predators lurking around at night with access to your garden. This one may or may not work. It seemed to have attracted us a peacock that selectively feasts on only allium plants. It flies in and out of there like a pterodactyl. It’s a current situation we’re dealing with. I thought it was dogs and/or my chickens but was dumbfounded as to how they were getting in. Until my wife alerted me of the massive and beautiful creature in our garden bed, which can be seen from the upstairs window.

18. Snail Shells

Just like eggshells, snail shells may be a good organic fertilizer ingredient that provides calcium for your garden. Calcium and phosphate are the two primary nutrients snail shells provide.

Water-Soluble Calcium (WCA) snail shell extract can be made by dissolving sun-dried crushed snail shells in brown rice vinegar in a jar at a 1:10 snail shells-to-vinegar ratio for 14 days. Strain it out and you have a nutritious snail shell extract to be used at a 1:500 to 1:1000 ratio when applying to your soil. It could benefit acidic soils. 

Additionally, Water-Soluble Calcium Phosphate (WCP) can also be made with snail shells if charred bones or bone meal are added to the ferment. 

Calcium Phosphate and Calcium fertilizers both play important roles for every stage of your plants’ growth. Deficiencies in either lead to stunted growth issues among others.

19. Rocks & Rock Dust

Rocks improve soil fertility with their mineral content. Actual rocks are a form of extremely slow-release free fertilizer. Over time, plant roots and fungi will break rocks down to get those minerals. But rock dust is how rock minerals are usually attained. 

While different rocks provide different minerals, the most common minerals found in rock dust include:

• Silicon (Si) 
• Calcium (Ca)
• Magnesium (Mg)
• Potassium (K)
• Phosphorus (P)
• Iron (Fe)
• Manganese (Mn)
• Zinc (Zn)
• Copper (Cu)
• Sulfur (S)
• Boron (B)

If you’ve soil tested and know you lack minerals, you may be looking into this as a free mineral fertilizer you can make from your own rocks. 

Just keep in mind rock dust should be used with care. It’s easy to use too much. And too much could affect your soil negatively. 

KNF fertilizers offer a good and safe way to get minerals. These may actually be the best way to attain minerals. They add the aspect of indigenous microorganisms alongside the mineral replenishments from your own materials. 

Mineral-containing KNF fertilizers include fermented plant juice (FPJ), water soluble calcium (WCA), and fish amino acid (FAA) all contain essential minerals your soil needs.

More Free Ways To Fertilize Your Vegetable Garden Naturally: Mulches & Cover Crops

Mulching is a slow fertilization. Some of the plants on this list, such as comfrey or vetiver grass, can be regularly mulched. Weeds, spent hay, etc. Mulching these is a type of free fertilization that you can generate from a mulch-plant specific garden bed. 

We’re putting vetiver grass around a pond right now for this reason, to support the slope while also giving us more mulch, fertilizer and composting material.

Feed Your Garden Soil For Free

If you’re a home gardener looking to upcycle materials and get away from relying on externally purchased garden nutrients, these free fertilizers make you far more self sufficient, they’re sustainable, and can be the basis of your whole garden’s fertilization.

They produce “living” soil.

Living soil is the goal of organic gardening. Things go right when you have living soil. Garden soil remains living if we tend to it correctly. Giving it these natural solutions full of IMOs and good nutrients will ensure it remains full of good fungi, good bacteria and happy earthworms (which are there to eat and provide even more nutrients for your plants and soil through their castings). 

When made from your own local and organic materials, these homemade solutions build your soil’s beneficial microorganism populations. The end result is happy and healthy crops.

Thank you for coming by the Sprouting Fam blog!

Next: Here’s a couple of different, but similar-listicle style articles here in the gardening category, also introducing our new sprouting category:

1. 14 Plants That Repel Aphids
2. 36+ Types Of Sprouts To Jar Sprout At Home