Seamungus, what it does for a vegetable garden
What Seamungus actually is
Neutrog make Seamungus from seaweed and fish, with humic acid and manure, and the whole lot is composted before it's pelletised. That composting step is the part worth understanding, because it's what separates this sort of product from a bag of quick fertiliser, and it changes how you use it and what you should expect it to do.
A soluble fertiliser is plant food. It's already in a form the roots can take up, so it works within days and it washes out of a sandy soil almost as fast. A composted pellet is soil food. It has to be broken down by the life in your soil before the plant sees much of it, so it's slower to show, and what it leaves behind is organic matter rather than just nutrients.
Why that matters more here than it would somewhere else
A lot of soil around Strathalbyn is either sand that lets everything run straight through, or clay that holds water and then sets like a brick. Organic matter is the one thing that genuinely helps both of those, because it gives a sandy soil something to hold moisture and nutrients against, and it opens a clay soil up so roots and water can get through it.
That's the real argument for a composted product in a veggie patch. You're not only feeding the crop that's in the bed, you're slowly building a soil that needs less watering and less intervention next time round, and a vegetable bed gets stripped hard every year so it needs putting back.
Using it without burning anything
Because it's composted, Seamungus is forgiving in a way that raw manure and high analysis fertilisers aren't, so it can go in close to planting without cooking young roots. Follow the rate on the bag, because the rate changes with what you're feeding and with the pack size you've bought.
The method isn't complicated. Spread it over the bed, scratch it into the top few centimetres so it's in contact with damp soil rather than sitting on a dry crust, and water it in. It needs moisture and soil life to do anything at all, so a handful thrown on dry ground in the middle of a hot week is a handful wasted.
It's a seasonal feed rather than a weekly one. Most people put it through a bed at planting time and again partway through a long crop, and the pelletised form means it releases gradually instead of all at once.
Where it doesn't do the job on its own
This is the bit most articles leave out. A conditioner builds the soil, and a hungry crop partway through its run often wants something faster than the soil can deliver.
Leafy greens pushing hard, or tomatoes and capsicums once they're carrying fruit, will usually respond to a liquid feed on top, and that's not a failure of the pellets, it's just two different jobs. The liquid Seamungus concentrate exists for exactly that, and a watering can of it every few weeks alongside the pelletised version covers both ends.
The other thing it won't do is fix a pH problem. If a bed has gone sour and nothing grows well in it no matter what you feed it, that's a lime question rather than a fertiliser question, and adding more organic matter on top won't sort it out.
Shop related products
- Seamungus Green 20kg. The big bag, for doing whole beds at planting time.
- Seamungus 500g. A small pack if you just want to try it on a couple of pots.
- Neutrog Seamungus Liquid Concentrate 1L. The faster liquid feed to run alongside the pellets.
- Neutrog Rapid Raiser 20kg. Another composted Neutrog pellet if you want a general purpose one for the whole garden.
Did you know we also keep the Neutrog Seamungus 10kg bag in the garden centre in the shop, which is the size most people actually want, and it isn't listed on the website. Give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf. The rest of what we carry is in the Neutrog range and the wider garden centre range.
Read next
- Why your tomatoes are struggling, and how to fix it
- How to grow vegetables in clay soil
- How to make compost tea and when to use it
It smells like low tide for about a day after you water it in, which I choose to take as proof it's working.
Cheers,
Candeece
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