Fertilizer is food and your plants might be looking hungry mid-summer

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – If your garden looks like it's dying, your plants might just be hungry. Sometimes in the middle of summer, we all need a little reminder to fertilize our plants.

“Yeah it’s always a good refresher to have that. You know we're always gung-ho in the spring. We get everything planted and we water and fertilize and then life happens and then we forget about it. So summer is a time we do need to fertilize. It is very important,” said Jeff Wallitsch, with Wallitsch Gardens.

Annuals and perennials need weekly or biweekly fertilizing.

“The best thing that we like to use of course is Monty's. Monty's is great, it's local, its easy to use, its already in liquid form and during the summer months you want to use the root and bloom version of the Monty's,” Wallitsch suggested.

But when it comes to your veggies—get that insurance policy and use a granular fertilizer.

“It'll last about 3-4 weeks. Every time you water or every time it rains, it will slowly leach food into the soil and that way your plants will have some nutrients,” Wallitsch said.

Sometimes your vegetables also need help with a specific problem and there are fertilizers to help with that. Wallitsch said tomatoes are giving people a lot of problems this year.

“Tomato tone here has some calcium added to it. A lot of people have been getting blossom end rot on their tomatoes, which is the black bottom of the tomato. The tomato tone will help with that and give calcium to the plant,” he said.

Don’t forget—your trees and shrubs need some love too.

“You want to fertilize in the months of May all the way through the month of September,” Wallitsch said.

You simply fertilize once a month, but then stop by the end of September because any new growth that would be produced, would die in the first frost.

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