What makes an organic fertilizer truly organic?
A fertilizer can be labeled as all-organic when it is completely composed of naturally-occurring ingredients. While people place an organic label on manures–and products such as bone meal, blood meal and “hoof and horn” are considered organic–most blended organic fertilizers do not contain these products. Most organic fertilizers use only plant and fish by-products as a source for their nutrients. The majority of organic fertilizer blends contain a mixture of alfalfa meal, cottonseed meal, kelp meal, feather meal, fish bone meal, mined potassium sulfate, soft rock phosphate and seaweed extract. Organic plant foods break down faster in meal form than in pelletized form, because pellets have a binding agent that needs to be broken down before the nutrients can become available to the plant roots.
