Making Homemade Tomato Fertilizer

Clean out your brushes and comb the cat, its time for making homemade tomato fertilizer. That’s right, I said hair. When active organic gardeners get together there’s a lot of secrets that pass between them. One of the secret ingredients to getting a strong tomato plant is including hair when making homemade tomato fertilizer. Crushed eggshells are another “secret ingredient”. Simply line the hole first with either or both and then add your tomato plant.

The ingredient in hair that makes the secret planting formula logical is the keratin, a protein that comprises most of the hair. Keratin contains some sulfur and about 15 % nitrogen, but it breaks down slowly. This means that it becomes a slow release fertilizer. Other elements in hair also enrich the ground. Using fertilizer on tomato growth with hair in it helps the tomatoes throughout the season.

Eggshells, as many know are a wonderful way to add calcium to the soil. Crushed eggshells also have about 1% nitrogen content. When you lime the lawn, you are in effect, doing the same thing as adding the ingredients of the eggshell. Other types of fertilizers also contain calcium or lime to create a rich soil and great growing environment. If you have a gas oven, save the shells in a container and allow the heat from the pilot to slowly dry them out before you crush them.

Now, you may want to go back to your kitchen and find other things that you throw out on a regular basis to lop into that compost pile. Your plants like a little coffee too! Use those old coffee grounds and dry them in the same pan, or separately from the eggshells. Once dried, they sprinkle a lot better. Mix them into your compost pile or serve them up to your garden mixed with crushed eggshells. When creating homemade tomato fertilizer, you don’t need to get fancy and go to a lot of expense to return nutrients to the soil. Some of the simple items you discard on a daily basis make the best fertilizers for tomatoes.

Nothing goes to waste when you compost your material for the next year. Rake up those leaves and start the compost pile. Be aware that if you have black walnut trees, there are toxins that aren’t healthy for the garden. You probably won’t see a lot of growth if the root system is close by the garden. The highest concentration of the toxic substance juglone is in the roots.

Once you have the pile, you can add all sorts of things to it. How to make the fertilizer is up to you and what you have in your cupboards. If you have a bunny or know someone that does, use the bunny droppings in your compost pile. Don’t forget the lowly earthworm either. An earthworm compost pit can catch grass clippings, kitchen scraps like peelings off vegetables and all the things mentioned earlier.

One last item for making homemade tomato fertilizer is the use of Epson salt water. A tablespoon of Epson salt to a gallon of water sprinkled on your tomatoes once a month gives them plenty of magnesium and sulfate.

Don’t overdo any one item in your compost pile. Keep it moist when you’re making homemade fertilizer. For a really rich but stinky fertilizer make a fish tea. Put a fish in a cloth sack and let it hang in water. Pour the water over the garden. An alternative that wastes nothing is to pour your dirty fish tank water into a container and use it to water the garden. When you’re making homemade fertilizer, a liquid emulsion made from the teabag technique can use bird droppings, manure or other items. These get quickly to the roots of the plant.

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