23 Awesome Organic Fertilizer Ideas

If you aren’t blessed with naturally fertile soil, you may have asked yourself what the best ways to fertilize your garden might be.

Even if you are lucky enough to have nutrient-dense ground, it can be difficult to maintain the appropriate levels of nutrients in your soil to encourage healthy crop production.

Rather than spend a fortune on expensive, dangerous chemical fertilizers, why not use a more natural solution? These are some of the best low-cost (often free!) options to support your garden health - without introducing chemicals.

**J&R Pierce Family Farm is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to allow sites to earn advertising fees by linking to products on Amazon. I often link to Amazon when recommending certain products, and if you choose to purchase, I may earn a small percentage of the sale. It costs you nothing extra, and all recommended products are ones that I personally vouch for. **

What is the Best Homemade Organic Fertilizer?

Organic fertilizers are the best way to provide essential nutrients for plants:

Homemade organic fertilizers can be made from compost, manure, kitchen scraps and other natural ingredients.
Compost is a great source of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium which are important for plant growth.
Manure provides additional micronutrients that help boost soil fertility and promote healthy root development in plants.
Kitchen scraps such as eggshells or coffee grounds can also be used as organic fertilizer to add extra nutrition to your garden soil without having any negative impacts on the environment.

I’ll tell you all about the best homemade organic fertilizers you can make for your garden in this post, but here’s a video to pique your interest:

23 Organic Fertilizer Ideas You Can Make At Home

1. Save Your Banana Peels

Banana peels are high in potassium - good for you, as you know, but also good for your plants. You can either add the peels to your compost or you can toss them right in the planting hole when you plant. Your plants will get an excellent dose of potassium as the plants degrade - you won’t need to lift a finger.

2. Add Coffee Grounds

You can toss some spent coffee grounds and filters into your compost, or, as with the banana peels, you can put them back into your planting hole. Coffee is high in nitrogen, but it releases slowly, so you don’t have to worry about it burning your plants. It also has magnesium, phosphorous, and copper -everything your plants need to be healthy.

3. Save the Fish Tank Water

If you have a pet fish, you probably know that you need to replace a percentage of the water each week to keep your fish healthy. But did you know that you can save this water and reuse it on your garden? A lot of commercial fertilizers use fish emulsion as a nutrient-base, so if you have a fish tank that requires regular cleaning, the spent water will serve as a great way to fertilize your garden and water your plants at the same time.

This same theory applies for cooking water, too!

4. Recycle Some Molasses

If you have some molasses hanging around the house, you might want to consider adding it to your worm tea. Interestingly, molasses adds sugars that provide beneficial bacteria and microbes essential feed.

5. Add Limestone

If you have acidic soil, you might want to add limestone. It can balance pH and it also adds calcium. Just make sure you test your soil before adding limestone to avoid swinging things too much in one direction.

6. Get Corny

Both corn gluten meal and regular cornmeal can help fertilize the ground. Cornmeal, in particular, helps to present fungal diseases and it can prevent things like damping off and leaf spot. You’ll want to go for whole-ground organic cornmeal to be effective.

7. Rotate Your Livestock

There are some types of animal manure that can be added directly to the garden - such as rabbit pellets. However, others burn hot and will need to be composted. You can safely add livestock manure like sheep and rabbit pellets to your garden pretty much immediately but you should wait to add chicken or horse manure until they’ve broken down more.

Otherwise, you can also house your birds or other livestock uphill from the garden. As long as you don’t have manure overload (which you can ensure by maintaining proper stocking densities), you should be fine allowing the manure to trickle slowly downhill into your garden.

You can also house your chickens in the garden over the winter, allowing them to till and fertilize the garden for you. The upside to this is that it will also give your birds plenty of forage during the springtime, helping to reduce your springtime chores.

8. Use Blood and Bone Meal

If you do your own on-farm slaughtering you might want to save the blood and bones to make your own fertilizers. You can also purchase these at the store, but making your own will definitely save you some money.

9. Save Your Fireplace Ash

Small amounts of ash can boost the alkalinity of the soil if you find that you are having problems with too much acidity. Ash also supplies valuable amounts of potassium and calcium.

10. Recycle Your Egg Shells

Have your chickens been laying a ton of eggs lately? If so, save their eggs. You can grind them up and add them directly to the compost, or even add them to the planting hole when you transplant your seedlings. Eggshells have a ton of caliche as well as limited amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen.

11. Sea Things Differently…

...by adding some kelp! Kelp has a ton of potassium and some nitrogen. It can stimulate soil development, increasing your overall yield. Interestingly, kelp also has the unique ability to improve temperature tolerance in certain crops. You can buy kelp in the form of an organic fertilizer, but if you live near the sea, you might as well just gather some and compost it yourself.

If you really want to be one with the ocean, consider purchasing or making fish meal to use on your plants. This can be stinky, but you can purchase fish emulsion, too.

12. Use Alfalfa Meal

Alfalla is another plant-based fertilizer that contains a high amount of nitrogen as well as phosphorus and potassium. It can improve soil quality and allow plants to synthesize nutrients more easily. Although it will help most plants thrive, it seems to work best on roses.

13. Find Bat Guano

You might not have access to this fertilizer at home, but you can purchase it relatively inexpensively at many nurseries. This all-purpose organic fertilizer has a ton of nitrogen and a lot of beneficial trace elements. Plus, there’s very little chance that it will be contaminated with pesticides.

14. Reuse Your Gelatin

If you have a ton of gelatin hanging around the pantry, you might want to add it to your garden. Gelatin is an excellent source of nitrogen. You can dissolve a package into a cup of hot water and then add three additional cups of cold water to help treat your plants.

15. Add Powdered Milk

Powdered Milk is a great way to add calcium to the soil without attracting animals or worrying about an unpleasant smell.

16. Feather Meal

As with bone and blood meal, feather meal can help fertilize your soil, too. It’s a byproduct of processing chickens on the farm, so if you have a lot to cut up, consider saving the feathers. It does take a long time -up to four months - to take effect, however.

17. Use Gypsum

Gypsum is a natural amendment material, also known as calcium sulfate, that is nearly a quarter calcium and 17% sulfate. It helps to neutralize toxins in the oil and improves soil structure.

18. Light it Up

Okay, don’t set things on fire. But if you’re trying to find natural sources of magnesium for the soil, consider tossing a soaked match into a planting hole. The magnesium will dissolve and fertilize your soil.

19. Put Your Weeds to Work

If you have a ton of weeds that need to be pulled, you can compost them and let them degrade. They’ll contribute a ton of nitrogen to the compost, which can then be used to fertilize your garden. Just make sure you get the compost hot enough to kill any weed seeds!

This same theory applies for grass clippings - if you’re trying to figure out ways to fertilize your lawn, just leave the grass clippings there. About half an inch of grass will serve as excellent weed-blocking mulch, and it will also fertilize the soil. And if you have fallen leaves in the autumn, you can safely leave them there, too.

20. Compost Expired Feed

If you have animals and find that your feed has gone bad, you can add it to your compost bin. Alfalfa pellets along with chicken and horse feed are chock-full of protein - good for your animals, and good for your plants. Just keep in mind that you will want to keep your compost covered to avoid attracting pests and potential predators.

21. Get Creative

Still searching for potential additions to your compost bin? Here are some ingredients that would make an excellent addition to your compost:

Seashells
Beer grains
Beans
Borage
Comfrey
Crustacean shells
Epsom salts
Hair
Milk
Nut shells
Pine needles
Straw
Rock Dust
Borax
Fish
Worm Castings

22. DIY Fertilizer Mixes

Here are some simple recipes you can follow to improve the nutritional content and soil structure of your garden.

Worm Tea Fertilizer - Recipe here
Seaweed Fertilizer -Recipe here
Fish Emulsion Fertilizer - Recipe here

23. Best Storebought Organic Fertilizers

Not into DIY? Here are some of the best storebought organic fertilizers you can buy...

Do you know of any other awesome fertilizers I've missed? Be sure to let me know in the comments!

If you’re looking for more ideas, be sure to check out these gardening posts below:

Want to learn more about farming? Be sure to check out these featured articles!

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