Sulfur for the Garden
As a person who has run a landscaping business, I would often like to experiment and play around with different kinds of soil fertilizers, garden sulfur being among the many I would blend and try. To me, fertilizer is like coffee, there's lots of different blends and varieties, and coming up with your own custom blend that's perfect for your yard or garden is just a lot of fun. That's where garden sulfur comes in. Garden sulfur is a chemical that's often neglected by gardeners, but is a perfect fertilizer for certain situations. Most people are quick to run to iron or phosphorous, but the key is knowing what your soil is deficient in. Because your average person has difficulty in diagnosing just what's wrong with the soil and what fertilizer needs to be added, they generally buy a multipurpose fertilizer that replenishes a range of nutrients into the soil. That's not a terrible practice, I myself have often used multipurpose fertilizers on lawns and gardens. But I think that in order to get the very best results, it's good to know exactly what your plants need and give it to them often. Below is a quick explanation of the benefits of garden sulfur and the reasons why you would or wouldn't want to use it in your garden.
Garden sulfur is very helpful in balancing the soil's pH level wherever it's absorbed. Depending on what kinds of plants you have, whether acid loving plants or alkaline loving, garden sulfur might be just the right thing for you. Garden sulfur will raise the acid level of the soil it's spread over so you can see why you would need to be careful. If you're not sure whether or not your plants are acid loving, there are a few things you can do to test before you go out and spread garden sulfur over everything. A few acid loving plants are azaleas, pine trees, rose bushes, hydrangeas, blueberries, and evergreens. One very easy common test is to spread some used coffee grounds onto the soil around the roots of your plants that you think might be acid loving. This too will raise the acidity and pH of your soil. Even if you're not a coffee drinker yourself, you can usually go to your local Starbucks to get grounds. Many locations even have old coffee grounds in bags out on display for people to take for free, but even if they don't you can always just ask them for a bag.
Once you have your old coffee grounds, spread a little all around the roots of your plants, and water it into the soil. After that, watch very carefully to determine if the plants do better or if they do worse. If they do better, then you should think about picking up a bag of garden sulfur to do the real amendments and to bring the pH of the soil into optimum levels. It's not all that expensive and it has other healthy nutrients in it also. That being established, I know a few gardeners who advocate permanent use of coffee grounds as a fertilizer to the soil of their acid loving plants. Coffee grounds have a range of other soil fertilizers as well, things like phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and more. In general, it's rich and plentiful in nutrients. Just be careful with it. As I mentioned earlier, this definitely will lower the pH of your soil, which makes it more acidic. So don't just go putting it everywhere.
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