All gardeners know that a plant obtains its food through its roots, which will seek out from the soil all the nutrients the plant needs to grow. And because all gardeners want their plants to grow well, the idea of feeding them with fertiliser was inevitably bound to take off. Fertilising plants is something we’ve been doing for centuries. Indeed, before Victorians like Joseph Bazalgette introduced proper sewerage systems, many market gardeners used human sewage – the euphemistically named ‘night soil’ – to feed their plants. We can be grateful that nowadays we buy our fertiliser from garden centre shelves packed with neat cardboard boxes and sterile plastic bottles and tubs, but now that so many of us are trying to be as low-input as possible in our gardens, should we rethink how readily we reach for them?
Using fertiliser in the garden has almost become a force of habit. “It is a capital plan to start them off with a little good fertiliser,” The (1927) advises its
