Not Coffee Grounds: 3 Natural Fertilizers For Thriving Petunias

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If you love having lots of color in your garden, growing petunias is one of the easiest ways to achieve this. There are so many different varieties available in a massive range of colors to suit every garden aesthetic. You'll even find cultivars perfect for hanging baskets that hummingbirds can't resist. There's not much you need to do to keep your petunias thriving except giving them ample water and a regular dose of nutrients. These plants are pretty heavy feeders, so instead of just giving them coffee grounds, you'll want to opt for more nutrient-dense, natural fertilizers, such as compost teas, bone meal, and fish emulsion.

Bone meal is generally known to be a good addition that can boost the health and productivity of your garden soil. One such products from Down To Earth, contains an N-P-K ratio of 3-15-0. This means it has some nitrogen, plenty of phosphorus, and no potassium, making it perfect for adding to the soil at the time of planting because it will help to stimulate good root growth. Follow the directions on the pack, which should say to incorporate the meal into the soil that you fill the planting hole with, making sure not to add more than is recommended. Bone meal will help get your plants off to a good start, but you will need to follow this up with some liquid fertilizer, in the form of compost tea or fish emulsion, once the plants start to flower.

To really help your petunias thrive once they're established and start blooming, apply a water-soluble fertilizer once a week. This should result in lots of growth and copious amounts of blooms because the plants will use what you give them straight away. If you find that the petunias are growing too much and starting to crowd out other species in your garden, you can reduce the frequency to every two weeks.

For this, you could use compost tea, which you can make yourself using a bucket filled with water, some molasses, an air stone, a large piece of cheesecloth or a burlap sack, and some compost. Essentially, you put the compost in the cheesecloth or sack and steep it in the water-filled bucket. The air stone oxygenates the liquid, while the molasses jump-starts the bacterial growth. Of course, you could also just use the liquid that you drain from your worm farm or your bokashi bucket, if you have one of those.

If this sounds like a lot of effort, an easier solution is just to buy something like Neptune's Harvest fish emulsion, which is also one type of fertilizer that's safe to use in hot weather, and use it according to the directions on the pack. It has an N-P-K ratio of 2-4-1, so it should provide enough nutrients to help your petunias thrive. There are plenty of other brands of fish emulsion available, so just select the one that's most readily available to you.