How Dangerous Is Bone Meal Use to Fertilize Tulips?

Employing bone meal to fertilize tulips isn’t dangerous at all — it’s one of the preferred fertilizers for bulb flowers. You do not require much bone meal, and you just need to apply it once or twice each year, making it simple and cost-effective as a way to maintain tulips healthy and profitable. A couple of drawbacks exist, however, so weigh the fluid kind that’s ideal for your flowerbed.

The Way Bone Meal Helps Tulips

Bone meal’s most important benefit is that it also supplies a slow-release form of potassium into the ground. Tulips prefer soil that’s fairly bland, meaning that they do not like it loaded with tons of nutrients such as nitrogen. They require small doses of different nutrients, but too much could cause stunted growth or difficulties blooming for the tulips. The bone meal continues to release the essential phosphorus throughout the growing season, feeding the tulips and assisting them create large, colorful blooms.

How Much You Need and When

It doesn’t take much bone meal to assist tulips thrive. Adding a tablespoon of bone meal at the underside of every wax hole before you plant the wax is all you require. Tulips perform best when planted in the fall, which provides the bone meal a lot of time to release nutrients to the ground prior to the spring growing season arrives. For an added soil boost for next year, add another tablespoon about each plant after it fades from the summer.

Why You Might Want to Supplement

If you forgot to include bone meal to the planting hole in the fall, it’s too late in the spring to get the bone meal to perform any good to your current blooming season because of its slow-release qualities. Rather, add a superphosphate fertilizer around each plant, such as a 0-20-0. Use about 5 tablespoons of granulated fertilizer for each 10 square foot of garden bed to get bulbs. And though tulips do not like overly rich soil, they require a little more nutrients than that which bone meal provides. When your plants are not thriving like you believe they should — if the development is slow or the blooms are not forming in a timely manner from the spring — include a little amount of a balanced fertilizer, such as a 10-10-10. Five tablespoons each 10 square feet must be sufficient.

Bone Meal Disadvantages

Bone meal is traditionally utilized to help bulbs grow, but controversy exists over whether it’s the ideal alternative. Changes to the manner bone meal is currently mass means that the fertilizer doesn’t have the same concentration of nutrients it once did — many nutrients leach out throughout the manufacturing procedure. Also, the smell of bone function, which is made from the bones of creatures, might entice insects, raccoons or other animals to your yard, causing them to dig in your flowerbed to find the source of the odor.

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