Quote:
Originally Posted by Stainless
Yes; I sure did. I may need a little more later because I was a little on the light side just to see how they turned out early on.
I did sprinkle a little bit of Tomato Tone around the top the other day, but I didn't mix it in and it was only a little shake out of my hand. I wanted to wait till the plants settled in and took off before adding the full dosage of fert.
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You don't have to be afraid of using Tomato-Tone, it's all organic. The 5:1:1 mix doesn't have an NPK or any micronutrients in it to speak of, so I think that may be a big part of your problem. You should have mixed at least 1/4 cup of Tomato-Tone into the mix before you transplanted. Sprinkling it on top of the mix isn't going to be effective since the microbes in Tomato-Tone are needed to break it down into available nutrition for the plant. Those microbes work under the moist soil, not on top of the soil. At this point you can mix the Tomato-Tone into the soil down to 3" into the soil around the plants as per Espoma's directions. If you are growing strictly with organics, a liquid organic fertilizer like a fish hydrolysate & seaweed will give the plants a more rapid boost of nutrients in that mix and increase microbial activity which is critical to organic practices.