Why do plants need feeding?
Like any living thing, plants need water and food to survive. They make a lot of their food themselves, converting sunlight into energy, but that doesn’t give them all the nutrients they need to grow healthily. In the wild, plants would suck up nutrients from the soil. Those nutrients get constantly refreshed with rotting plant matter, animal/insect droppings and other delightful things. Obviously they don’t have access to those sorts of nutrients indoors. They only have what is in their potting soil. So we have to top that up with nutrients.
Regularly feeding your plants is equivalent to someone making sure you eat your five portions of fruit and vegetables. You'd survive without them, but you wouldn't be very healthy.
What is plant food?
First, a quick lesson: ‘plant food’ and ‘fertiliser’ are different terms for the same thing. Fertiliser is just the slightly more science-y word. Manufactured plant food can contain lots of things, but it typically has three key ingredients:
Nitrogen - Encourages strong growth
Phosphorous - Helps your plant produce stronger roots and healthy flowers
Potassium - Helps your plant fight off disease
For indoor plants, plant food is typically a liquid that you mix with water and then pour over your plant’s soil (food for outdoor plants is sometimes in the form of granules you mix into the soil).
How often do plants need to be fed?
When you buy a plant from Patch it will be potted in nutrient rich compost. It has all the nutrients it needs for a while, so you won’t need to feed it for at least three months.
Plants are not hungry year round. They only need to be fed in the months when they’re growing, in spring and summer. For most plants, a feed once per month in spring and summer will be perfect. When the weather is colder, in autumn and winter, most plants will be ‘dormant’, i.e. sleeping, and not growing, so they don’t need food.
Some plants are less hungry and need lighter food. Mostly that's cacti, like Spike or Ian. They prefer a cactus-specific feed. If your plant has any specific feeding needs, you'll find them on its product page.
Feeding your plants is really easy and takes very little time at all. But that tiny bit of extra effort will make the world of difference and you'll get much bigger, stronger plants.
For more on feeding, take a look at our plant care videos. We have videos to cover just about any plant-related question you might have.
