Stop Using Synthetic Fertilizers in Your Garden 

When people see a picture of my abundant garden, one of the first questions they ask is What kind of fertilizer do you use?

Well, guess what? I don't use fertilizer.

That probably comes as a shock in this day and age when fertilizing goes hand in hand with having a lawn or a garden. If you head to your nearest Lowe's or Home Depot, you'll see tons of products—everything from bottles of fertilizer to vegetable plant starts—with the Miracle-Gro logo. Miracle-Gro is owned by Scotts, one of the largest companies in the garden industry.

Many of us buy these products hoping for a quick boost in our garden, but they're often setting us up for failure. I found so much more gardening success once I stopped spending a ton of money on crazy blue pebbles of fertilizer from the big box store. (Why are they blue? I don't get it!)

Here's why using fertilizer can actually set you up for failure.

The Problems with Synthetic Fertilizer for Your Plants

First off, let me clarify that I'm talking about synthetic fertilizers like Miracle-Gro. I'm not talking about things derived from natural minerals and animal products.

Chemical fertilizers are like steroids for your plants. Taking steroids to build muscle faster is a way to rush the natural system. And that's what fertilizer is. Companies are trying to sell you on this idea that you can skip past natural processes that plants in the wild go through so that you can get to the end result faster.

Here are three reasons why you don't want to put the equivalent of plant steroids in your garden.

Plants Become Dependent on Synthetic Fertilizers

When plants are given chemical fertilizer, they come to rely on that exact material and the schedule that it's administered.

Imagine motivating a small child to get ready quickly in the morning with a piece of candy. Have you created a child who's much easier to deal with each day for the duration of their childhood? No. You've created a monster—because tomorrow, the second they wake up, they'll want another piece of candy. And if you don't give them candy, they're going to throw a fit. So you've created a cycle where you have to give them candy each and every day to get them to do what you want them to do. And the same is true for your plants.

Fertilizer is like candy for plants. (I know I'm mixing metaphors. You get the idea.) You know when you bring a plant home from the store and put it in your garden and then it just sits there, doing nothing? Maybe it doesn't die, but it certainly doesn't grow. If that plant was originally grown with fertilizer, then it's now that kid who's not getting candy. The plant is sitting there in your garden like, "Excuse me! Where's my treat?" Until you bring the treat, it's not going to bring the growth.

Fertilizer-grown plants are dependent on that kind of food. They want all of the nutrients that they should receive from nature over time in one little shot. They'll only be happy if you buy the exact fertilizer they're used to and follow the exact feeding schedule as the nursery. That's more of your time, your attention, and your money to keep those plants happy.

Fertilizers Are Bad for the Planet

Fertilizers are bad news for our planet, our atmosphere, and our bodies. The making of the fertilizers themselves requires the mining of fossil fuels, and each bottle of fertilizer sold has a large carbon footprint, beyond the plastic container it's sold in.

One of the main issues is the runoff from the fertilizers. Because, of course, the fertilizer doesn't just stay in your garden; it gets washed out by rain, seeps through your yard, and enters the sewers or the groundwater. From there, it's on to our waterways. It's causing toxic algal blooms that kill fish, it's killing our coral reefs, it's creating coastal dead zones.

It's affecting the entire cycle of life on this planet. So many plants and animals end up being impacted by each drop of fertilizer we spray on our plants. We think we're working in insolation, but we're not. Every synthetic chemical we bring into our garden goes out into the world, where it disrupts nature. There's no such thing as a self-contained little ecosystem in your backyard.

I could go into more details on all the ways fertilizers impact our planet, but I'll save that for another day.

Fertilizers Aren't Necessary

When we use something like Miracle-Gro, we miss the miracle of nature. Think of how moved you feel when you walk through a park or take a hike in nature—somewhere wild and nourished by the minerals in the soil and the circle of life happening all around. The places least touched by humans are often the most awe-inspiring.

We can actually recreate this in our gardens if we don't mess with them. If we let nature do its thing, if we plant the way plants grow in the wild, if we resist the temptation to give our plants steroids to coax faster growth. We can walk out to our gardens and know there's nothing extra there.

Just the magic of the Earth we live on. Just the miracle of your home. And that is enough.

Nature is fast enough. It's big enough. It's amazing enough. It doesn't need anything the store is trying to sell you in a bottle.

There's No Miracle-Gro in Nature

I learned to garden by visiting national parks. My husband and I have never taken our kids to Disney World. Instead, we brought them to nature so they could exhaust themselves, not from waiting in line for ride after ride, but from climbing mountains. One of the first parks we went to was Big Bend. We thought it'd be a great idea to bring our four young children out to the desert, where there were few living beings for hundreds of miles...

I had just started my garden at the time. It was July, so Big Bend was extremely hot and sandy. And yet there were plants growing everywhere I looked, even in the most peculiar of places. Everything was failing in my garden, but here life was thriving in the desert. What was I doing wrong? I had a raised bed and soil from Home Depot. I had plants from Home Depot. But I was clearly missing something.

That's when I realized I needed to stop taking lessons from the big box stores and fertilizer companies. I took notes from nature herself instead.

I went home and did my best to imitate the vegetation I'd seen at Big Bend. Small, medium, and large plants had been growing in clumps—never spaced 12 to 18 inches apart. There'd be tall plants in the middle surrounded by medium-size bushes and then lots of ground cover spreading outward. So I started packing in my plants, grouping them as close together as possible and filling each bed with a variety of plants.

Before I added fertilizer, I asked myself: How would the plants at the national park get nutrients? The answer is things like rainwater, animal manures, degradation of plant matter, and decay. There's a constant breakdown of materials around the plants over time. If I was serious about imitating what happens in nature, then I couldn't bring in an external force that would push things to grow faster or larger. I had to simply reenact what happens in the wild inside my raised beds.

And that's when my garden game changed and the pressure to feed my plants their daily candy disappeared.

Here's what I did instead of using fertilizer.

Plant the Way Plants Grow in the Wild

Pack in the plants. Big plants in the middle, medium-size plants around them, and lots of small plants as ground cover. Six weeks after planting your garden, there shouldn't be any bare soil showing. You can learn more about my method of planting, called intensive planting, in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival.

Make sure you also have a wide variety of plants. Plants work together; they form symbiotic relationships, where one plant gives and another plant takes. Pay attention to the plants that work best together.

A great example is how peas fix nitrogen in the soil. I grow peas in the spring, and then I plant my tomatoes near the peas as soon as my last frost date has passed. The tomatoes grab the nitrogen from the soil as they start to grow, and they'll use the nutrients they gained naturally from the peas to propel their growth up the trellis.

Prune Your Plants Often

Plants out in nature don't just interact with each other; they also interact with wildlife. Picture an animal finding some vegetation. If it's an herbivore, what's it going to do? It's going to eat the lower parts of the plant. When humans remove parts of the plant, we call it pruning or harvesting. Either way, it stimulates the growth hormones in the plant.

Plants want to survive, and they get scared when they're pruned. They're like, "Oh no, Nicole's eating me! I need to grow bigger if I want to survive because she's coming in here and cutting every day!"

Pruning is just imitating the actions of animals out in the wild. Cut those bottom leaves from your plants on a regular basis.

Add Materials That Have Passed Through the Body of an Animal

What else does an animal do in natural spaces? It poops, okay?

I'm not asking you to poop in your garden—that would be a little much. But what I am asking you to do is buy some natural types of poop that you could bring into your garden space. That could be chicken manure, rabbit manure, or even just earthworm castings. Anything that's passed through the body of an animal is great to add around your garden space.

Add Compost

Another thing that happens in nature is degradation. Plant matter is constantly breaking down. Plants grow up, drop fruit, shed leaves, and those things get mixed into the soil with the animal poop, and they break down over time.

We can bring this same kind of organic material into our garden space as compost. Every few months, I add a couple inches of mushroom compost to the surface of my raised beds. Compost feeds your plants in the most natural way possible—the way nature does.

Maintain the Water

The last thing to consider is the weather. Plants need light, water, and airflow to grow. Sometimes gardeners have to imitate the weather in their gardens, so if you haven't had rain in a while, you'll need to make sure your garden is still getting at least one inch of water every week. If your plants don't have access to enough sunlight or airflow, that's where pruning comes in.

Time to Ditch the Miracle-Gro

And that is it, my friend. That's how you get to watch the miracle of nature without interrupting it with something like Miracle-Gro.

Let your plants do their thing. Work with their needs. I give more tips on working with nature in my second book, Leaves, Roots, and Fruit.

So are you ready to say bye bye to fertilizer, too? If you follow my planting and tending methods, you'll never have to spend your money on fertilizers and create dependent plants ever again. But you'll still have the most prolific, delicious, and beautiful plants. And you'll take better care of our one and only planet at the same time.

Thanks for being here and helping to make gardening ordinary again!