The Organic Feeding Calendar -
What to Feed Your Plants Each Season

Most feeding schedules are written for the wrong climate

Search for a plant fertilizer schedule and you will find advice built around spring, summer, autumn and winter. Feed heavily in spring, taper off in autumn, stop in winter. It is sound advice - for Manchester.

India does not run on four seasons. It runs on three that matter to a plant: a long hot dry stretch, a wet stretch where water moves through soil faster than roots can drink, and a short cool stretch. Feeding the same way through all three is the single most common reason a well-tended balcony garden looks tired by August.

This is a reference piece. Read the season you are in, use the calendar at the end, and come back when the weather turns.

Why the season decides the dose.

Same pot, same manure — the season decides where the nutrients actually end up
Nutrients do not go from soil to plant on their own. Three things have to line up: soil biology has to be active enough to convert them, roots have to be actively growing to take them up, and water has to be moving at roughly the right speed. The season changes all three.

In heat, roots work hard and soil dries fast, so nutrients are available but the plant may be too stressed to use them. In heavy rain, soil biology is thriving but water carries dissolved nutrients straight past the root zone and out of the drainage hole — leaching, and in a pot it is brutal because there is no deep soil to catch anything. In cool weather, microbial activity slows, root growth slows, and anything you add mostly sits there.

So the answer to when to fertilize plants is never a fixed date. It is whenever the plant is growing and the soil can hold what you give it.

Summer, March to June: feed the soil, not the leaves

Mulch, mix in, and feed in the evening — the three habits that make summer feeding work

Summer is a growth season and a survival season at the same time, which is why it confuses people. Tomatoes and chillies are fruiting, but by late May the plant is spending most of its energy on not cooking.

The rule that matters: never feed dry, stressed soil. Water first, feed after, or feed and water immediately. Concentrated nutrients in dry soil pull moisture away from roots at exactly the moment the plant has none to spare.

Work granules into the top two inches of soil once a month rather than scattering them on the surface, where they dry out and do nothing. Use liquid feed every two weeks, always in the evening, never at midday. And mulch — a layer of dry leaves, straw or coco husk over the soil surface cuts evaporation, keeps the root zone cooler, and slows the drying-wetting cycle that wrecks soil structure. Mulching is not a feeding step, but it decides how much of your feeding survives.

If a plant is visibly wilting in the afternoon heat every day, skip that month's liquid feed. It cannot use it.

Monsoon, July to September: the season everything washes away

Get the pot off the ground before you worry about what goes into it

Everything looks wonderful in the monsoon. Growth is fast, leaves are lush, nothing needs watering. Then September arrives and the plants are pale and leggy, and nobody can work out why.

Two things are happening. Water is moving through pots continuously, dissolving nutrients and carrying them out of the drainage hole. And roots sitting in saturated soil cannot get oxygen, so they stop absorbing regardless of what is available.

Drainage comes before feeding. Raise pots on bricks or clay feet so water leaves freely, empty every saucer, and clear blocked drainage holes. A pot standing in its own runoff will lose plants no matter how good the manure is.

Then change how you feed rather than how much. Split the monthly granule dose in half and apply it twice, so less sits in the soil waiting to be washed out. Use liquid feed only during dry breaks between spells, not into already-soaked soil. And watch for fungal problems — thin out crowded growth so air moves, because humid still air on dense foliage is how leaf spot and mildew start.

October is the month most gardeners underfeed

Here is the part missing from most seasonal plant care India advice. October and early November are the best growing weeks of the Indian year: warm soil, strong light, no waterlogging, no heat stress. Everything grows. This is when to feed properly. Full granule dose worked into the soil, liquid feed every two weeks, and any repotting or sowing you have been putting off. Winter vegetables sown now — palak, methi, coriander, radish, beans — establish in weeks. Plants that were beaten up by the monsoon rebuild in this window or not at all. Most people are still on a reduced monsoon routine through October. Skipping it costs more than any other single scheduling mistake.

Winter, November to February: slow down, don't stop

Winter advice depends heavily on where you are. In Delhi, Jaipur or Chandigarh, January genuinely halts growth on most summer plants. In Mumbai, Chennai or Bengaluru, winter is a mild growing season and some of the best gardening weather you will get. Either way, the principle is the same: reduce, don't stop. Soil biology slows in the cold, so a full dose of anything mostly sits unused. Cut granules to half a dose, stretch liquid feed to once a month, and cut watering back sharply — cold wet soil does more damage in a north Indian January than the cold itself.

Move pots into whatever winter sun you have, even if that means shifting them across the balcony. And if you are growing winter vegetables in a mild climate, keep feeding them normally. They are in their season, not out of it.

What FOM and LFOM each do in this schedule

A feeding calendar for plants only works if you know why there are two products in it rather than one. FOM granules are the base layer. Worked into the top soil once a month, they release slowly and feed the soil itself - organic carbon, microbial activity, structure that holds water and nutrients. This is the part that compounds. Soil fed this way for a year behaves better than soil fed for a month.

LFOM liquid is the response layer. Diluted and watered in, it reaches roots within days, which makes it the right tool for a plant that needs help now: a monsoon-leached pot, a fruiting tomato at peak demand, a seedling establishing after transplant.

Both are fermented and stabilised, which is what makes a fixed schedule possible at all. There is no waiting period to observe, no risk of burning a seedling you moved that morning, and no batch that behaves differently from the last one. You can only plan a calendar around something predictable.

The month-by-month feeding calendar

For pots and terrace beds. Scale up for open ground, and shift the monsoon rows a few weeks earlier if you are on the west coast.