When & How We Fertilize Young Seedlings & Garden Starts

This is a surprisingly controversial topic within gardening, so we figured we'd wade right into it! The topic of fertilizing young seedlings is certainly one where a lot of gardeners aren't sure of their footing and so we figured it'd be appropriate to talk about what we do.

Our approach is to discuss some of the things that we know about young plants and seedlings, from their biology to physical characteristics. We also talk about some of the scientific background in how plants utilize nutrition. Using this, we're able to provide reasoning for our practices with the fertilization of young seedlings and garden starts.

We probably practice fertilization earlier than most other gardeners would. A big part of that is our short, subarcitc growing season and the zero room for error. If our plants are stunted or fall behind early in the season, it can have detrimental impacts to our final harvests. And sometimes affect whether we get a harvest at all.

This subject is likely to have a wide range of opinion. We honestly think this is a lot like most topics in gardening where there's a vast chasm of acceptable answers. It's entirely logical that a grower at sub-tropical latitudes might do things differently from one growing just below the arctic circle. There's rarely a singular "correct" way and you can raise plants to maturity and often, things come down to the preferences or growing circumstances of that gardener.

So, this is more a "what we do" as opposed to a "how to do" kind of video. (And that stands for almost all of our work.) We're simply trying to get information out there about the things we've found to be important in our subarctic gardening practices.

We called it out in the video, but this practice is somewhat delicate. We're always talking about very small amounts of fertilizer. If your plan involves signficant amounts of any given fertilizer, regardless of manufacturer, you're probably doing it wrong.

What we'd tell you is that over the years of gardening, we've faced various nutritional deficiencies. At the seedling stages and also in full plant maturity. While there are ways to solve these problems using entirely "natural" and organic methods, using fertilizer fits well into our broader subarctic gardening practice.

We'd also tell you that since we've implemented relatively early fertilization practices, those problems with nutritional deficiencies have largely evaporated. We're not talking about mainlining our plants with NPK at this stage, just the idea of making their efforts a little bit easier.

Our hope is that you find this video, as well as the others in our fertilization series, helpful. We've done a ton of experimentation with fertilizer and just generally know a lot about it, so we figure it'd be helpful for us to talk about the various things we know.

And as always, we welcome you to check out our far northern focused blog where we have tons of deep dives into cold climate gardening topics! It's our 10th year anniversary! We never imagined when we started it that we'd be doing all the things we do these days!

https://FrostyGarden.com

Thanks again for watching! Feel free to comment if you have any questions, thoughts or video suggestions!