While a far away OPEC we richly endow....

We got a blast of late winter weather this weekend. Low around 10F. I hope it will be the last of the really cold weather for the year. I fertilized the garden area this weekend. I had intended to do it earlier, but I've been waiting for my fertilizer to show up at one of the local feed stores. It took a month to come, but every week they told me it would be there next week. I got the impression that I was irritating the employees, but what can you do. I applied 450# of soybean meal (7-2-1) to the garden for nitrogen, and a 50# sack of ammonium phosphate (11-52-0) for phosphorus. The garden area is about 1/5 acre, so this amounts to 185#/acre nitrogen, 175#/acre phosphorus. There is already plenty of potassium. I considered a lot of choices when choosing my fertilizer scheme. First you've got the all chemical option, which is cheap, easy to apply and readily available. However, the nutrients are quickly leached from the soil, which is bad for the environment. I don't have an easy way to apply extra fertilizer using my drip irrigation, so I definitely want something that would be slower-release than the normal nitrogen fertilizer. Manure or compost are good, but bulky. Given what the soybean meal cost, and the hassle with the feed store, I think next year I'll use manure The seed meal and manure are organic fertilizers. Ironically, these organic fertilizers are made more affordable by non-organic agriculture. The soybeans are cheap because of pesticides, GMOs and chemical fertilizer, and the manure is plentiful because of the same soybeans, antibiotics and etc. The organic options for a good phosphate source are more limited. You've got rock phosphate, which is bulky and of questionable availability (both in stores and in the soil), and bone meal. I read that bone meal isn't available in the soil at alkaline pH, so I decided this year to use chemical fertilizer. Maybe next year I'll try something else. If peak oil isn't your doom of choice, perhaps you'll consider peak phosphate.