Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

Nitrogen, as I was taught in high school chemistry, is one of the easy elements to remember, as it is represented on the periodic table as the letter N.

As I previously posted, Nitrogen is one of the three basic nutrients in gardening, part of the NPK ratio (Nitrogen:Phosphorus:Potassium). When you buy a bag of fertilizer, with this ratio on the front of package, Nitrogen is always listed first - for instance this box of Bat Guano fertilizer has a ratio of 10-3-1, which means that it has a much higher proportion of Nitrogen than it does Phosphorus or Potassium.

Now that is all well and good, but what is the purpose of Nitrogen in the soil? Well, dear readers, Nitrogen promotes the growth of leaves and foliage as well as the fruit of the plant. The goal of growing a tomato plant from seed is to, in the end, have a large and healthy fruit.

Simplified a great deal, Nitrogen is introduced into the soil by the slow decomposition of organic materials. Think about the story of Thanksgiving, and how the Indians showed the Pilgrims how to use a dead fish to more effectively grow corn. Thus, we use fertilizers made from organic material, such as the above mentioned guano, other animal manure, as well as seed meals. Ideally, we will use something that will release add nitrogen slowly over the course of an entire growing season. In my case, I will probably use something like cottonseed meal, which will break down much slower than manure.

The combination of the plants use of Nitrogen mixed with the constant Northwest Rain, it is important to supplement this element back into the soil. The ratio that we are shooting for is 5-5-1.

Fast Facts about Nitrogen:
-It was discovered by a Scottish scientist named Daniel Rutherford back in 1772.
-Nitrogen makes up 78.1% of the Earth’s atmosphere.
-Its atomic weight is: 14.00674
-It is atomic number 7 (which is coincidentally a pretty cool name for a band).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Soil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.