Organic Ingredients – 5 tips for using seaweed in the garden

Seaweed is one of those garden additives that people either swear by or fear. Seaweed has by default a large quantity of sodium in it. Plants do not need sodium for growth and if they did, ground sodium at minute levels is ample.

Many Organic gardeners use seaweed regularly.

Seaweed can take a long time to breakdown especially when added as mulch. The longer it takes to breakdown the more nitrogen it is depleting from the soil.

5 ways you can beat the salt and use seaweed in your home organic garden:

  • Store seaweed in a wire cage with no bottom. Leave the cage in an area that will not be effected by high salt levels. Let the natural elements wash and blow the salt from the seaweed and give it a regular wash through with fresh water.
  • Shred seaweed and mix with equal amounts of fresh green lawn clippings. Use this mixture at a rate of no more than a third of total mix, in compost that includes chicken manure and hay or straw.
  • Once the seaweed is well weathered and washed (a month during a wet winter would be sufficient) it can be dug into garden beds in preparation for spring planting. Using a trench composting method is ideal. Shredding is not necessary when digging into the garden.
  • Chooks love to scratch around in seaweed. Placing seaweed on the ground and let the chooks scratch it over the winter months. This is an excellent way of eliminating weeds and adding extra nitrogen to the soil that the seaweed will deplete.
  • Despite the high levels of sodium, seaweed is naturally high in other minerals that are beneficial to the soil and plants.

Seaweed used in the garden is not the same as the kelp often associated with seaweed/s. The seaweed used in the garden is more like a sea grass.

Something for you to try: I have had a lot of success growing organic potatoes under a mixture of seaweed and old grass hay. Lay potato tubers on top of the ground place loose hay around 12 inches thick. Add seaweed over the hay to another 12 inches thick. The seaweed will help prevent light from getting in to the tubers preventing them from going green. The seaweed will begin to decay as the potatoes grow. This hay and seaweed mix can be added to the compost heap or used as a mulch around beetroot, spinach, silverbeet or other beet crops. It will gradually break down and add more nutrients to the soil.

May 28, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Organic Gardening

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