Feeding azaleas ?

[Nicos]

I was given a beautiful azalea last year and potted it up but I’m aware it should be fed around now.
I don’t have any feed for acid loving plants.....can anyone please recommend something? I really don’t want to risk going to the garden centre - which may be closed anyway in the near future!

[mothhawk]

Do you drink tea? Give it all the tea-leaves from the tea bags, and if you make tea in a pot, all the dregs too. The tea-leaves will feed it,, and make a nice mulch too.

[ameno]

Just use poultry manure, if you have it.
Ericaceous plants don't really need a special feed, per se, they just need one which has a neutral or slightly acidic pH (which poultry manure does) and which has little to no calcium in it (so that rules out blood, fish and bone, thanks to the bonemeal). Ericaceous plants can also struggle to absorb nitrogen in the form of nitrates, instead preferring ammonia-based nitrogen. The nitrogen in poultry manure is mostly urea based, which breaks down into ammonia, so it's perfect.

If you can't get poultry manure, garden compost would be good, too, although perhaps a little on the weak side. Same with horse manure. At a push, most chemical granular or liquid feeds would probably be adequate, as long as the nitrogen in them is in the form of ammonia (it's likely to be ammonium sulphate in a chemical feed), rather than nitrate, and they have no extra calcium or bicarbonate.

They do also tend to need extra iron, as they struggle to absorb it from the soil, especially if the soil is not acidic enough. Poultry manure will have a little in, but not much. You can get iron sulphate pretty cheap online (it's cheaper just to buy from a chemical supply place than a gardening one), and a little can go a long way. Just sprinkle a little around the top of the pot and water it in, maybe twice a year. This also has the benefit of keeping the soil acidic.

[Martin H]

I can't add to the excellent advice from MH and Ameno. But this thread has just reminded me of an article I read in the RHS magazine, might have been last month, about how it may be possible to grow Rhododendrons in alkaline soil by giving Manganese supplements, like Manganese sulphate. Research is ongoing, but in my next garden I'm determined to try and grow some Rhodies so I might have to give it a try. Manganese sulphate is pretty cheap online.

A quick search on the internet for science on this didn't bring up the RHS piece but I did spot this piece of recent research,

https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals...3-mcaleese.htm

Sorry to go off at a tangent, but I wanted to mention it before I forgot again

[Nicos]

Ah...fantastic everyone!... thank you.
We have chooks and I drink gallons of tea

I do have some tomorite equivalent ...I'll check out the contents...