Extensive Gardening: DIY Complete Organic Fertilizer

The following is a recipe for Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) as described by Steve Solomon in Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. Many of my notes are taken from his book and from the essay “Building Fertile Soil The Easy Way”.

Complete Organic Fertilizer

According to Solomon is “The perfect fertilizer for home-garden vegetable crops would be a dry, odorless, finely-powdered, completely organic material that would not burn leaves.” Complete Organic Fertilizer fulfills all of those requirements. It is also inexpensive and readily available. For those folks that like numbers, COF is approximately 5-5-1 to 5-4-2 NPK.

To make Complete Organic Fertilizer, uniformly mix:

4 parts any seedmeal except coprameal (meal made from coconuts)
½ part ordinary agricultural lime
½ part dolomite lime
1 part kelpmeal.

The parts do not have to be exact, which is very helpful since you will probably be using a shovel, trowel or scoop to measure.

All of these materials are readily available at feed stores.

Remember to keep the COF in a water tight and rodent proof container in a dry location.

I made a batch of Complete Organic Fertilizer in July, 2012 and paid the following prices from Concentrates Inc. in Milwaukie, Oregon (they sell large bagged quantities but also have a bulk section).

$2.00 – 1 pound kelpmeal

$0.13 – 0.5 pound agricultural lime

$0.15 – 0.5 pound dolomite lime

$3.20 – 4 pounds cottonseed meal

$5.48 Total

This works out to $0.92 a pound.