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Old February 20, 2011   #15
dice
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: PNW
Posts: 4,743
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What is best depends a lot on the soil or container mix.

Old Tomato-Tone's 4-7-9 was considered near perfect
for tomatoes by many, but if you had a container mix
or soil with a lot of sawdust or woodshavings in it, for
example, bacteria digesting the wood fiber would end
up using a lot of the nitrogen, making it unavailable to
the plants, which would probably show nitrogen deficiency
symptoms. In topsoil and compost or in a container mix
that is mostly peat or coir, you do not get that effect,
and most of the nitrogen in whatever fertilizer you use
is available to the plants. (The 5-1-1 of Alaska Fish Fertilizer
fish emulsion would end up something like 1-1-1 or .5-1-1
as far as the plants are concerned in a growing medium with
a lot of high-carbon materials like wood fiber, undigested
straw, etc).

As for Fish-Mix, I would expect that 2-3-3 or 2-3-4 would be
better. Mix in some bone meal, fish bone meal, high-phosphate
guano, rock phosphate, or superphosphate with the Fish-Mix,
and you have a good balance for vegetables like tomatoes.

Fish-Mix by itself sounds like it would be good for vegetables
that are prone to bolting in hot weather where the part of
the plant that you harvest to eat are leafy greens. (You really
do not want to stimulate flowering with abundant phosphorous
in their growing media with crops where early bolting is an
occasional problem.)
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Last edited by dice; February 21, 2011 at 05:46 AM. Reason: spelling
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