Seedling Fertilizer Experiments

[Chucker]

I started some seeds for seedling fertilizer experiments tonight. I'm bored, and after the wet/cold spring we've had in Illinois, it will be a while before I get any tomatoes. So, why not experiment?

Ask the internet if you should fertilize seedlings, and you will get answers all over the board, from no, you should never give seedlings any fertilizer, to yes, you should give them some phosphorous from fish emulsion, to it's fine to give them a weak amount of the blue stuff. For the past few years, I have fed my seedlings with 1/2 tsp / gallon of the blue stuff, and that seemed to work out ok, but they always looked weak. This year I fed them 5mL/gallon of Dyna Gro Liquid Grow, and that worked out great. They were a nice dark green and very healthy.

So, what will I do next year? My first experiment will be to try homemade Calcium Nitrate and Potassium Nitrate fertilizer. Using these ingredients will leave the phosphorous at zero. My hope is that this will produce shorter seedlings. I plan to grow one seedling in plain distilled water as the control and increasing amounts of the CaNO32 and KNO3 for the other seedlings, probably 1g/gallon, 2g/gallon, etc.

I will try to provide weekly pictures, and if this one fails, try something else.

The seeds of choice will be Burpee Super Beefsteak simply because they were on sale at Menards tonight and I'm not going to waste my saved seeds .