Fertilizer for Milpa Gardens: How Much Do You Actually Need?
Learn how much nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium your milpa garden actually needs. We break down why legumes do the heavy lifting for you, when to use compost instead of bagged fertilizer, and how to let soil biology unlock nutrients you already have in the ground.
View Transcript
0:00 So people often ask about fertility requirements for the melbourne garden. You know, do I need nitrogen, do I need phosphorus, do I need potassium? And the answer is, well, you know, I don't.
0:10 Know what your soil looks like so that's a little bit difficult to know. The milpa has a lot of legumes in it. It's got beans, it's got peas. There's a variety of legumes so we don't.
0:21 Want too much nitrogen fertilizer put on or you'll make those legumes lazy. You won't encourage them to nodulate with the rhizobia bacteria that can take the nitrogen out of the.
0:32 Atmosphere and put it into the soil. So if you're going to fertilize, I would limit the amount of nitrogen that you put on to probably 25 to 35 pounds of nitrogen.
0:43 Should be all that you really need to get it going, especially if it's in a system where you're recycling the nutrients from a previous year.
0:52 If it's just a really worn out tired old piece of ground that you're just kind of trying to get going, it may require 40 or 50 pounds of nitrogen to kind of get that jump started and boosted.
1:02 Phosphorus, potassium, those other things. Again, a soil test would give you a better indication of what you might need, but I would keep it on the lower end of what you think you might need.
1:25 Are in your soil the phosphorus, potassium and the calcium. You need the biology involved to unlock that. If you have access to compost or manures.
1:34 Those are going to be by far the best way to get nutrients and fertility out to your melpa garden, much better than something coming out of a bag.
1:44 It's going to be a more natural process. It's going to be more beneficial to the biology, so keep it on the lower side. If you want, you can experiment with.
1:52 Having one strip where you do a higher rate of nitrogen or other fertilizers just to see if it would make a difference and then do the rest of the field at a little lower rate number one to control your costs and number two to allow the biological system to work the way that God created it to work.