About Plant Pep™ Organic Plant Fertilizer
Grow Green with Heidi’s Plant Pep™ – One Garden at a Time!
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HOW TO BREW THE PLANT PEP™
For best results, steep the brew bag in four cups of hot water for 15 minutes or longer. Heidi’s Plant Pep™ will not burn the plants no matter how long the bag is steeped. Add to 2 gallons of water, which is the size of an average watering can. Make another brew with the same bag by letting the brew bag steep for 30 minutes or overnight. You can of course brew 4 gallons all at once. After use, open the tea bag and apply the herbs as a garden top dressing or compost. Heidi’s Plant Pep™ concentrate can be used directly on houseplants.
GROW GREEN WITH HEIDI’S PLANT PEP™
SEEDS - Seeds should not be fertilized until their second set of leaves (true leaves) appear. Then water the bed with Heidi’s Plant Pep™ and continue with the schedule for annuals.
ANNUALS - When planting the seedlings, add about 1/4 cup or a little less to the base of each plant. Apply weekly during the early growing season.
Once the plant is established, apply every two to three weeks. Tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, etc: Double the amount and apply every two weeks.
PERENNIALS - As soon as the plant appears in the spring, apply 1/2 cup to perennials and re-apply every 3 weeks. Increase/decrease the amount of fertilizer depending on the size of the perennial.
CONTAINER AND HOUSEPLANTS - Keep in mind container plants rely on a consistent feeding schedule to replenish nutrients in the soil. Apply every 2 weeks to containers, every 4 weeks to houseplants with a spray bottle.
Grow Green with Heidi’s Plant Pep – One Garden at a Time!
HOW MUCH AND HOW OFTEN?
Most indoor and outdoor plants benefit from a feeding every couple of weeks during their growing season, with less frequency during the winter or other dormant periods. This is the time when the plant takes a rest, so feeding every 6 weeks is sufficient. Heidi’s Plant Pep™ is so gentle that even if you use extra, it will not burn the plant. You can recycle the used brew bag by adding the contents to the soil or your compost.
Suggested use:
Using the concentrate: You can use the undiluted concentrate directly on the soil. However, if you prefer to feed and water at the same time, I recommend a ratio of ½ cup concentrate to 1 gallon of water.
As a foliar spray: Fill a spray bottle with 1 tablespoon concentrate for each quart of water. Thus, each brew bag makes almost 5 gallons of foliar spray. Plants absorb nutrients 20 times faster through their leaf pores. Foliar sprays are particularly beneficial for seedlings and plants stressed from drought, transplant shock or other conditions.
For seedlings and transplants: Heidi’s Plant Pep™ is gentle and easy to absorb, making it an ideal food for infant plants. Plants raised on Heidi’s Plant Pep™ easily fend off pests, transplant shock, and diseases. Start feeding seedlings as soon as they develop their second pair of leaves. Use the foliar spray dilution, and apply weekly directly onto the soil and/or by spritzing your plants with a spray bottle.
WHAT IS HEIDI'S PLANT PEP™ N-P-K?
The blend has N-P-K values of 2.07 – 16.00 – 2.61. You can see that the middle number, P, is fairly high, which means that the Plant Pep contains a healthy amount of phosphorus, important for flowering and fruiting plants, trees and shrubs. Please don’t be misled by the N-P-K numbers that suggest organic fertilizers are not as good as chemical fertilizers. It is actually far better because it feeds and builds the soil while it nourishes the plants. This is one of the primary ways organic fertilizer has a 
leg-up on chemical ones.
Chemical fertilizers are salts, manufactured from coal or natural gas. The chemical salts, that white crusty residue left from chemical fertilizers, “suck the life right out of beneficial soil microbes which is the very heart of healthy soil” - Teaming with Microbes: a Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lowenfels
Heidi’s Plant Pep™ contains a generous handful of micro-nutrients (trace elements) such as calcium, sulfur, zinc, iron, copper, manganese, sodium, and molybdenum, just to name a few.
Just a word about greensand:
Greensands, also called greensand marl or glauconite greensand, is an undersea mineral deposit, in fact, it’s 75-million years old! Greensand is a rich olive green color and it contains many important elements naturally found in sea water. It is a rich source of potassium and some 30 other minerals that are important to plants, such as silica, magnesium, and phosphorus.
Photo: The re-created Physic Garden of Dr. Thomas Corbett, Canterbury Shaker Museum by Heidi Herzberger, herbalist and landscape curator