The Blessing of Side Dressing

I remember when my grandfather taught me how to garden.  It opened a whole new world to me.  Simply watching the miracle of a seed being dropped in a hole and a few days later witnessing the tender seedling sprout out of the ground had me hooked for life.  I remember how he taught me to water and weed the garden and, as the plants began to grow, to side dress my vegetables with fertilizer.  "Just like you and I eat, plants have to eat, too," he told me.

These days I primarily feed the soil, amending it almost daily with compost and other organic fertilizers, pulling out weeds, mulching it.  It is always important to take care of your soil, if you want it to take care of you.  Our cole crops are growing quite nicely.  Even though we got a bad start, losing most of our cole crop seedlings to rainy, soggy weather that persisted for months on end, we went to plan B and recovered nicely.  On a nice Saturday afternoon, the temperatures in December spiked to 80 degrees, causing the leaves on the cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower to wilt a little.  They like cooler temps. 

I took the opportunity on this glorious day to side dress the vegetable plants.  I wanted to give them some food to make them happy as they will begin producing heads in the next few weeks or a month.  Just as we operate best when we're well-fed, plants will produce best when they have the nutrients they need.  There is nothing quite like home-grown vegetables fresh from the garden.

I had some organic fertilizer tucked away on the shelf under my work bench and got it out and headed to the garden.  Russ came out to help me.  I grabbed an old spoon that we no longer use to eat with to use for digging holes.  I find that is the best thing to use when side dressing.  When plants are close together, I don't want to risk damaging any of them with a hoe.  A spoon is much easier to use for this task.  Side dressing is doing precisely what the name suggests - with the spoon, I dug a hole on the side of the plant and deposited the prescribed amount of fertilizer into the hole and then covered it up.

Side dressing allows the nutrients to be available near 'root-level' so that the fertilizer is accessible to the growing plant.  We'll check on them in a few days to see if the plants are happy with their "meal."