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Originally Posted by Fletch
Short answer... Hell Yes! and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool.
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Perhaps you should ease up on the emphasis. Maybe you could tell us about your fertilizer regimen and show us your results.
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Originally Posted by Fletch
In fact, being in a confined environment like a pot makes root burn from fertilizer even more likely if misapplied, no matter what the source. Also, as you mentioned, organic source fertilizer adds the complication that the decomposition process first uses nitrogen from your soil before the organic matter breaks down into a form readily absorbed by your trees. So in effect over fertilizing could first starve and then burn your trees, a very nasty double whammy.
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The correct answer to this question is, "It depends." It depends on the tree, the soil, the fertilizer, and many other things.
If I were to take uncomposted manure and put it two inches thick on each pot, yes, it will rob nitrogen and probably hurt my roots. But the odds of my doing that are nil.
Question 1: What "organic" fertilizer do you mean? Is it commercially produced?
Question 2: How are you applying it?
Question 3: What is your soil made of?
Question 4: What species are you growing?
This is such a general question that your answer makes little sense, Fletch.
For instance, here is my fertilizer regimen for almost all my trees.
I use a
soil mix from a recipe I got from Boon, so there are no organic components to the soil.
I make my fertilizer cakes from the following ingredients, and they are not completely organic:
Bone meal
Blood meal
Cottonseed meal
Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly before moving on.
Then I mix together fish emulsion and full strength liquid fertilizer like Peters 20-20-20 as a mixing solution, and add just a bit of liquid sevin to kill maggots.
Then, adding just a little liquid at a time, I mix with a trowel until the mess is the consistency of oatmeal. I pour it out on aluminum foil (a discarded cookie sheet is good for this, lined with foil) and use my trowel to get it abot a half inch thick. Then I score it with the edge of the trowel and let it sit. In the sunshine, it will dry fairly quickly, and then I separate them and turn them over to dry more fully.
Using the soil mix I do, on say, a six inch pot, I will place four of these cakes. I may even add just a smidge of osmocote across the soil, depending on how hard I want to push the growth. These cakes last about 4 weeks, after which they are ineffectual. So in two weeks, I add four more cakes between the first four. Two weeks later, I take off the first four cakes and replace them with four more.
For a tree in development, especially one that needs a lot of new growth, sometimes the entire pot surface will be covered with cakes. I have yet to burn roots or harm a tree.
The real question is why Americans are so afraid to fertilize their trees. We give just a little here and there, waiting until the foliage is yellow to give some more. This does not keep our trees small. It keeps them weak.
Michael Persiano is where the recipe came from, and it's in Bonsai Today issue 47. He calls it superfeeding and it's quite controversial in the U.S. In Japan it's called feeding.
So generally, the answer to the question should be, it's quite difficult to do so if you are following common horticultural principles with your bonsai.