There’s nothing like a chemical free home grown tomato picked fresh from your back yard garden!
There are many ways to keep your vegetables chemical free now days and properly fertilized. By using organic fertilizers such as manures, blood meal, bone meal or just a simple Milorganite fertilizer, you will keep your garden vegetables much healthier for you and your family.

Horse manure can usually be picked up from horse farms for free. Applying this to your garden at an acceptable rate will not only allow your plants to flourish, but produce larger and juicier fruits and vegetables.

Blood meal and bone meal can be bought from your local nursery or farm supply stores. Blood meal is a dry, inert powder made from blood used as a high-nitrogen fertilizer and a high protein animal feed. It is one of the highest non-synthetic sources of nitrogen. Bone meal is a mixture of crushed and coarsely ground bones that is used as an organic fertilizer for plants and formerly in animal feed. As a slow-release fertilizer, bone meal is primarily used as a source of phosphorus.

Milorginate fertilizer is an easy option as it comes in 20-50lbs bags. It too can be purchased at your local nursery or home and garden store and comes in small fertilizer pellets. It can be spread through a fertilizer spreader and is beneficial to the garden for nourishment.

Lastly, planting Marigolds around the perimeter of your garden will also help keep certain pest away. Annual Marigolds can be used anywhere to deter Mexican bean beetles, squash bugs, thrips, tomato hornworms, and whiteflies. They are also known to repel harmful root knot nematodes (soil dwelling microscopic white worms) that attack tomatoes, potatoes, roses, and strawberries. The root of the Marigolds produces a chemical that kills nematodes as they enter the soil. If a whole area is infested, at the end of the season, turn the Marigolds under so the roots will decay in the soil. You can safely plant there again the following spring.