They don't need a lot of fertilizing. With mine each year I loosely scatter a thin layer of compost in early spring before the tips emerge from the ground and water it in well, that's all I do until winter approaches (aside from normal maintenance). My compost mainly consists of rotted organic leafy and grass trimmings material, some garden soil and some crumbled up well rotted horse manure all well mixed together.
In late autumn/early winter before any snow or deep freezes start I put down a thin mulch layer of some dry leafy material right on top of the dead, dry lily leaves that have just expired. That acts as insulation for the bulbs and by next spring time the leafy mulch and dead lily leaves have been broken down into humous and been pulled down into the ground by earthworms. The worms do most of my work for me.
If you don't have access to rotted horse manure you could apply a
highly diluted fish emulsion to the ground in the spring. Fish emulsion is an excellent fertilizer that can be stretched to go a long way. You can get a
small bottle of that at a garden supply store or nursery. But for lilies take note that it MUST be much more highly diluted with water than the instructions given on the product package will say is needed for other plants because lilies don't like as much nitrogen as what is in fish emulsion. Too much nitrogen can kill them. So for example if the fish emulsion package instructions say to add just 1/2 ounce (about two tablespoons) of fish emulsion to 1 gallon of water, for lilies it should be 1/2 ounce of fish emulsion to
3 gallons of water, or if in doubt make it 4 gallons of water. And only apply that just the one time each spring.
Here is some information about fish emulsion:
https://www.thespruce.com/fish-emuls...%20or%20garden.
Personally as an all purpose fertilizer I really prefer rotted, dried horse manure (horse apples) crumbled up by hand and scattered lightly onto the ground. That stuff is worth its weight in gold.
Here is some comprehensive information about using different kinds of manures for fertilizer, there is also some information there about how to make a manure fertilizer "tea" to give to plants as a foliar feed that gets sprayed directly onto the leaves of plants.
https://www.westcoastseeds.com/blogs...om/poop-manure
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