Hydrangeas fertilize: when and with what? The best 6 fertilizers

There are many good fertilizers, and a best fertilizer for your hydrangea, tailored to your needs. In the article, you will learn how to get as close as possible to this best fertilizer. What is the best fertilizer for your hydrangea does not depend on the brand name, but on the nutrient composition of the fertilizer. It also depends on the condition of your garden floor and how you manage your garden, here follows the guidepost to your very own best fertilizer:

The best fertilizer for hydrangeas in the garden

What is the best fertilizer depends a little on your self-conception as a gardener and on the condition of the garden floor in which the hydrangea lives:

1. If you manage your garden close to nature, your garden soil regularly sees mulch, good mature compost and maybe even green manure, you have certainly planted a well-fitting hydrangea in a well-prepared soil. It probably gets a mulch layer around the root so you do not need so much irrigation water, and some compost in the spring. All this is already the best fertilizer for the hydrangea, nothing else is needed.

2. The "normal hydrangea" in the "normal garden" can be treated the same if the soil is reasonably nutrient-rich. If it concerns a rather precarious garden soil, has long been maltreated with monocultures / artificial fertilizers / pesticides and therefore not in the best condition or just after the completion of the house building piled up, (you could first give up the hydrangea and bring the garden floor in order, with Green manure and so on).

Since you are reading this article, you probably do not want to do that, then you could feed your hydrangea with organic-mineral natural fertilizer, which does not require precise calculations because it is progressively mined. If the compost is still in progress, look for finished organic and mineral fertilizers with a nutrient composition as stated in 3. If the soil organisms are just beginning to migrate and your hydrangea reveals that they are not yet doing the nutrient digestion satisfactorily, add a little bit of long-term fertilizer.

3. If you do not have time / desire to care for the soil or nature in the garden, but can count on it, you can feed your hydrangea with a synthetically manufactured, readily available fertilizer from the trade.

This only makes sense if you make a soil analysis beforehand. The normal need of a hydrangea covers a fertilizer that contains nitrogen and potassium in approximately equal proportions and half as much phosphorus (eg NPK 7/3/6). The soil analysis (best of the state laboratory, is cheap and they usually get a fertilizer plan) helps you to adapt this normal needs exactly to the hydrangea in your garden soil.

4. If you have no time / inclination for soil analysis (should not be a criticism, is in a time when many people do their jobs under fairly stressful circumstances, rather normal), only fertilizers after feeling helps. That's a bit like having someone take a tap at the gas station because they did not realize they need to select diesel or gasoline and a certain octane number, but you can do that to the satisfaction of hydrangea + garden floor if you Proceed as follows:

• Use whole plant fertilizer with the composition NPK 7/3/6 described above
• The best long-term fertilizer, is released gradually, the plant allows in doubt certain compensation
• Follow the instructions on the package
• This is really with sense rule, too much can be really deadly, for plant, soil, environment, groundwater + someday also human
• Stay at the lower limit of recommended concentrations / quantities
• Complement with compost, horn shavings, mulch, manure, etc., experimental and informal and always a little more natural material
• Compost usually comes from the public composting area of ​​the municipality
• At some point you will have an organic garden that is in ecological balance and needs little support ...

The advantage of this method is that you have to "read" your hydrangeas on the way to their optimal nutrition, an education with the certificate "Green Thumb".

Tip - Frequently, low-phosphorus hydrangea fertilizer is recommended, which does not even make sense to people who know the optimum phosphorus - soil and hydrangeas need phosphorus if they lack it, otherwise not. This recommendation comes from times of blue hydrangeas, in addition to the aluminum sulphate, phosphorus can interfere with the aluminum uptake. Today, blue staining with aluminum is a rather tricky topic because it has not yet been conclusively researched when aluminum damages our central nervous system (de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium), so it should be done in the tub.

5. Special hydrangea fertilizer is not recommended, any fertilizer of the correct composition is a hydrangea fertilizer regardless of name. If you buy "blind" "hydrangea fertilizer", you could get fertilizer on which (contrary fertilizer regulation) no NPK ratio is specified, which uses you little.

6. The best fertilizer is given over the growing season, with a bit more potassium in the fall, as it helps the hydrangea to mature and increases its resistance. And it is given only until August, then nitrogen would make the plant more frost-prone.

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Fertilize hydrangeas in the tub

With hydrangeas in the tub you need synthetically produced (long-term) fertilizers, because the small volume of soil will never accommodate the amount of soil organisms to decompose organic and mineral nutrients for hydrangea sufficiently quickly. But you can combine fertilizer with / from natural products and synthetically produced fertilizer, creates in doubt better nutrient balance.

The smaller the bucket, the more accurately you need to calculate the amount of fertilizer and the more carefully you need to observe the hydrangea to see if the amount has to be corrected down or up.