Marie Dodge said:

"Pat Kiewicz" wrote in message
...
Marie Dodge said:

They don't sell liquid seaweed where I live. I don't care to start
ordering
things online because the shipping is often as much as the items to be
shipped.

Yes, but some things are cheap at twice the price, and sometimes
shipping
is nowhere near equal to the cost of the item shipped (even these days).

Consider Maxicrop seaweed *powder* where you avoid paying to ship
water:

http://www.arbico-organics.com/1313001.html

Get it shipped by priority mail. It's cheaper.

The product is $14.75 and shipping is $11.50 = $27.25!

That much lasts me two or three years. (And my quoted shipping by
USPS was only $7.00.) It's equivalent to many *gallons* of liquid seaweed.

I wouldn't transplant anything without it. Greens up the occasional
plant that goes chlorotic. Promotes general vigor as a foliar feed.


(I would have recommended The Eclectic Gardener, as a satisfied
customer, but they are sold out of Maxicrop powder. )

http://www.eclectic-gardener.com/maxicroppowder.html


If I ever play and win the Lottery maybe I can afford some of this high
priced organic stuff.

If you gardened on a sand pit like mine, it wouldn't make sense to fertilize
any other way...rain will leach anything soluable right away, which is money
down the drain (almost literally).

My main fertilizer in the vegetable garden is alfalfa (pellets), supplemented
by Maxicrop and all the compost and mulch I can make from autumn
leaves collected all around the neighborhood. Still have some bags of
leaves way in the back from last fall, which will go into more batches of
compost as the sweetcorn stalks get pulled.

15 or so years ago I was able to give the veggie garden a heavy dose of
greensand, but I was lucky at the time to be able to buy it locally in 40
pound bags. Doubt if I could afford that now, as no one seems to carry
it in big bags anymore and the freight costs on that would be really
astronomical. I wish that weren't the case, though...


I buy this mail order *even though* I have seen liquid kelp on sale
locally, because it is so much less expensive (in the long run) to buy
the dry powder even considering shipping, and because the dry powder
is so much more convenient to store.

I'm in Lowe's and Home Depot regularly and yet haven't seen any of these
organic fertilizers. Perhaps there isn't enough call for them here. Or
they're so expensive people wont pay the price. Twice I bought the liquid
Iron and twice it turned into a tinny smelling liquid once opened, with
white stuff like scale in it at the bottom. That was when I switched to
Ironite.

That's the beauty of a dry powder. Sits there on the shelf so you can mix it
up as needed.


--
Pat in Plymouth MI ('someplace.net' is comcast)

After enlightenment, the laundry.