Fertilizer!

When it comes to fertilizing my plants, these guys are my best tools! That's Romulus and Remus, my adorable bunnies. Rabbit poop is the best fertilizer money CAN'T buy! It's also the only kind of poop that you can directly apply to plants without "burning" them. Plants are "burned" when something that is applied to them has too high of a concentration of mineral salts. So horse, cow and chicken poop have to sit and mature for about 6 months to a year before they can be useful to plants. You can just dump the poop right on the plants but the most effective way of getting the minerals to the plants is by making a poop tea. Gross sounding, right? The basic way of doing this is to take a bucket, put a few scoops of poop into it, add a little molasses (not sure why but it really works!), and let it sit overnight. The next day, just strain off the poop and water your plants with the remaining liquid. The plants absolutely love it, especially the tomatoes.

Fertilizing plants is a good thing once in a while, especially if you have weak soil. With a container garden, however, fertilizing becomes extremely important. This is because when you water the plants, the water drains out, taking the important nutrients with it. If you don't add the nutrients back into the soil, the soil becomes very weak. Luckily, there are lots of homemade fertilizers that you can make for free (or at least, very cheap). If you have rabbits or know someone else that does, that's an amazing source of plant nutrients. You can also make fertilizer tea with vegetable scraps or grass clippings! If you want to really go green, vermicomposting (worm composting) is a great way of reducing your amount of trash and creating amazing fertilizer. But, that's a post for another day :-)