The quietest starting "bang" I know is the unfolding of the trout lily flowers in my back yard. Their blooming is my signal that it's time to plant potatoes and peas. Once those crops are in the ground, the new planting season rolls out before me. In years when the weather cooperates, all goes smoothly, but usually the gardening proceeds in little bursts.
This past weekend, with Joe's help, the potatoes and peas were planted. Next weekend, if the forecast rain isn't too abundant, I will be planting little patches of carrots, beets, lettuces, and spinach.
Showing posts with label fertilizer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fertilizer. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Adventures in eHow
Several weeks ago I spent part of one day working with a video guy who produced educational films for Demand Media Studios, which had a deal to post them in eHow. In about five hours we made 17 little films about various gardening topics.
He got paid, but I didn’t, even though I worked hard, too. However, it was a very interesting experience. I had wondered about the whole eHow thing, and now I know a bit more about how it works.
The topics had to be chosen from a list provided by Demand Media Studios, and the wording wasn’t allowed to vary. For example, if the topic had the phrase “blueberry tree” in it, those exact words had to be in the introduction to the video. At first, this seemed a little weird to me, but it turns out to be a way to reach the audience where it is in terms of gardening knowledge, and the audience is full of people who might not yet know that blueberries grow on bushes rather than trees.
The experience also helped me understand why some eHow videos seem incomplete. We were given a pretty tight time limit for each video. There was only enough time for the "bare bones" of each topic, which meant that I had to leave out some potentially useful information. Also, because the filmmaker/videographer needed to have at least 15 little films lined up to make his trip out to my garden at all profitable, and because we had to choose from a somewhat eclectic list of topics, we were not quite “in season” for all the topics being filmed.
The good news is that the list included enough topics for which I had actual, real-life experience that we were able to pull the project together. Here is one example from the set:
When I started this blog, one main motivation was to share information - that might actually be helpful - about growing food in gardens here in the South. The Atlanta area in particular is packed with people who are not originally from here. I’m a perfect example: grew up in Oklahoma, but previously gardened in other states, including the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where growing food was super easy.
It would be pretty safe to bet that I am not the only person who has found gardening here a bit more of a challenge than it was in my previous yard.
I don’t know yet whether making eHow videos is at all helpful to gardeners who are new either to this area or to gardening itself, so I don't know whether I'll be making more of these, but I am happy to have been able to participate in this little project.
(Note: The videos are on an assortment of topics, including raspberries, blueberries, fertilizers, transplanting, plant propagation, and soil preparation; hence, the long list of "Labels" attached to this blog post.)
He got paid, but I didn’t, even though I worked hard, too. However, it was a very interesting experience. I had wondered about the whole eHow thing, and now I know a bit more about how it works.
The topics had to be chosen from a list provided by Demand Media Studios, and the wording wasn’t allowed to vary. For example, if the topic had the phrase “blueberry tree” in it, those exact words had to be in the introduction to the video. At first, this seemed a little weird to me, but it turns out to be a way to reach the audience where it is in terms of gardening knowledge, and the audience is full of people who might not yet know that blueberries grow on bushes rather than trees.
The experience also helped me understand why some eHow videos seem incomplete. We were given a pretty tight time limit for each video. There was only enough time for the "bare bones" of each topic, which meant that I had to leave out some potentially useful information. Also, because the filmmaker/videographer needed to have at least 15 little films lined up to make his trip out to my garden at all profitable, and because we had to choose from a somewhat eclectic list of topics, we were not quite “in season” for all the topics being filmed.
The good news is that the list included enough topics for which I had actual, real-life experience that we were able to pull the project together. Here is one example from the set:
When I started this blog, one main motivation was to share information - that might actually be helpful - about growing food in gardens here in the South. The Atlanta area in particular is packed with people who are not originally from here. I’m a perfect example: grew up in Oklahoma, but previously gardened in other states, including the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where growing food was super easy.
It would be pretty safe to bet that I am not the only person who has found gardening here a bit more of a challenge than it was in my previous yard.
I don’t know yet whether making eHow videos is at all helpful to gardeners who are new either to this area or to gardening itself, so I don't know whether I'll be making more of these, but I am happy to have been able to participate in this little project.
(Note: The videos are on an assortment of topics, including raspberries, blueberries, fertilizers, transplanting, plant propagation, and soil preparation; hence, the long list of "Labels" attached to this blog post.)
Monday, May 21, 2012
Are We Sure this is Spring?
It's hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:
The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:
And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:
These are Feherezon:
Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.
The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.
The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:
It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!
In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:
Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.
Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!
Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.
By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."
The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:
And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:
These are Feherezon:
Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.
The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.
The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:
It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!
In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:
Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.
Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!
Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.
By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thinking about Soil
On Wednesday morning I gave a little talk about building soil fertility using organic gardening methods. I was pretty surprised by the large turnout, but one feature of the talk was a demonstration of converting a recommendation for inorganic fertilizers (like 10 pounds 10-10-10 per 1000 sq ft, plus 15 pounds 15-0-15 per 1000 sq ft) from a UGA Soil Test Report to organic fertilizer ingredients. It turns out that a lot of people were interested in seeing someone put this math into action.
The Georgia Extension Service offers a handout on this conversion, so the demonstration wasn't anything I had to work especially hard to put together. The hardest part is choosing the ingredients to use in the conversion, since the list of possible sources is quite large, and some of them aren't widely available.
It turns out that the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden this year is going to need about 50 pounds of cottonseed meal per 1000 sq ft and 10.2 pounds of Sul-Po-Mag per 1000 sq ft to meet the requirements of "medium feeders," which describes most garden crops. "Heavy feeders" like tomatoes will need an extra (full) dose partway through the summer, and "light feeders" - mostly legumes - will need half as much as the other crops.
If building soil fertility were as easy as dumping in a few bags of amendments, though, we would all have perfect gardens! Unfortunately, to get really root-friendly soil, a little more is involved.
The biggest hurdle is working in enough organic matter that - in heavy clay soils - the clay particles are held apart so roots can grow and water can move freely through the soil, and that -in sandy soils - the big sand particles are held together enough that the water doesn't run right through and leave the roots in a desert after a few hours in the sun. The organic matter helps hold nutrients, helps maintain more even moisture levels, and it also contributes nutrients - especially the micronutrients that are missing in most bags of 10-10-10.
Getting more organic matter into heavy clay soils and into sandy soils is easy to manage in small gardens. A few bags of Nature's Helper (or similar organic amendment) and a couple of loads of compost from a pile in the backyard, with the addition of some mulch to keep the weeds down, is just about enough.
For larger gardens, getting enough organic matter into the dirt is more problematic. It is possible to buy soil amendments by the truckload, but that can be expensive. I, for one, would not like to be able to commiserate with the guy who wrote that "$64 tomato" book!
For people who can't really buy enough organic matter to dig into their soil, there are cover crops, also known as green manures. I grow one of these, hairy vetch, most winters in at least one of my garden beds. At the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, we have grown Austrian Winter Peas for this purpose. And the guy who wrote The Joy of Gardening, Dick Raymond, plants his dwarf peas and bush beans in blocks, then turns the plants back into the soil after they've produced, giving them a dual purpose.
One of the great things about cover crops is that they conserve nutrients by tying them up in the actual plants. It's hard to for nutrients to wash away when they are firmly rooted to the ground! If the crop is a legume, in the bean and pea family, there is the bonus of ending up with more nitrogen in the soil than was there originally.
We found, at the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, that we weren't really able to add enough organic matter as mulch (we used leaves that had been saved from the fall) to keep the soil in good condition. Over time, productivity of the garden fell, but switching to organic fertilizers and to using a cover crop made a huge difference. In my own garden, I've used mostly organic methods all along, but I haven't made as full a use of cover crops as I could have. This year, I think that will change.
The Georgia Extension Service offers a handout on this conversion, so the demonstration wasn't anything I had to work especially hard to put together. The hardest part is choosing the ingredients to use in the conversion, since the list of possible sources is quite large, and some of them aren't widely available.
It turns out that the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden this year is going to need about 50 pounds of cottonseed meal per 1000 sq ft and 10.2 pounds of Sul-Po-Mag per 1000 sq ft to meet the requirements of "medium feeders," which describes most garden crops. "Heavy feeders" like tomatoes will need an extra (full) dose partway through the summer, and "light feeders" - mostly legumes - will need half as much as the other crops.
If building soil fertility were as easy as dumping in a few bags of amendments, though, we would all have perfect gardens! Unfortunately, to get really root-friendly soil, a little more is involved.
The biggest hurdle is working in enough organic matter that - in heavy clay soils - the clay particles are held apart so roots can grow and water can move freely through the soil, and that -in sandy soils - the big sand particles are held together enough that the water doesn't run right through and leave the roots in a desert after a few hours in the sun. The organic matter helps hold nutrients, helps maintain more even moisture levels, and it also contributes nutrients - especially the micronutrients that are missing in most bags of 10-10-10.
Getting more organic matter into heavy clay soils and into sandy soils is easy to manage in small gardens. A few bags of Nature's Helper (or similar organic amendment) and a couple of loads of compost from a pile in the backyard, with the addition of some mulch to keep the weeds down, is just about enough.
For larger gardens, getting enough organic matter into the dirt is more problematic. It is possible to buy soil amendments by the truckload, but that can be expensive. I, for one, would not like to be able to commiserate with the guy who wrote that "$64 tomato" book!
For people who can't really buy enough organic matter to dig into their soil, there are cover crops, also known as green manures. I grow one of these, hairy vetch, most winters in at least one of my garden beds. At the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, we have grown Austrian Winter Peas for this purpose. And the guy who wrote The Joy of Gardening, Dick Raymond, plants his dwarf peas and bush beans in blocks, then turns the plants back into the soil after they've produced, giving them a dual purpose.
One of the great things about cover crops is that they conserve nutrients by tying them up in the actual plants. It's hard to for nutrients to wash away when they are firmly rooted to the ground! If the crop is a legume, in the bean and pea family, there is the bonus of ending up with more nitrogen in the soil than was there originally.
We found, at the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, that we weren't really able to add enough organic matter as mulch (we used leaves that had been saved from the fall) to keep the soil in good condition. Over time, productivity of the garden fell, but switching to organic fertilizers and to using a cover crop made a huge difference. In my own garden, I've used mostly organic methods all along, but I haven't made as full a use of cover crops as I could have. This year, I think that will change.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Broccoli, beets, and boron
(An updated version of this post about the micronutrient boron is on my new website, Small Garden News. The update was made in 2019.)
In this area, when a garden’s soil test results come back from UGA, near the end of the report, in tiny print, is a note about adding boron to the soil for broccoli and beets. The recommendation is for 1 tablespoon of boron per 100 feet of row, or per 100 square feet.
Boron, an essential micronutrient for plant growth, tends to leach out of soils that receive a lot of rainfall, and the metro-Atlanta area usually (drought years excepted) gets at least 50 inches of rain each year. That counts as a lot.
The good news is that organic matter helps hold boron -- and other nutrients -- in the soil. This means that gardens to which organic matter has been added routinely are less likely to be deficient.
However, some plants need more Boron than others. Broccoli and beets are two that need more, but the Boron page of the Agronomic Library for Spectrum Analytics has a longer list of high-boron users, referred to as "high response crops," and the list includes other root vegetables in addition to home-garden staples like lettuce and corn. The page also includes a table of deficiency symptoms that might help a gardener figure out whether low boron is a problem in his or her garden.
I’m thinking about this now because I planted the carrot and beet seeds yesterday. Both are on the “high response crops” list, so I will be adding some to their space tomorrow (it is raining today).
Boron isn’t present in the usual NPK fertilizer formulations (which I will not be using again anyway), but it is available in the laundry-soap aisles of many grocery stores, as 20 Mule Team Borax. I never plant as much as 100 square feet of any one crop, so I adjust the amount of borax to match the approximate square footage that I’ve planted.
I usually add the borax to a full watering can and try to move the can smoothly over the planted area for even dispersal. It is also possible to just sprinkle the dry powder over the area, but any wind makes even distribution less likely.
I only add boron to the areas that are planted with “high response crops" each year, rather than the entire garden, because I don’t want to add too much. The problem with micronutrients is right in their category name, the prefix “micro.” They are useful only when present in very small amounts. Too much is as big a problem as too little, and getting rid of what’s already been added is much harder than adding more.
In this area, when a garden’s soil test results come back from UGA, near the end of the report, in tiny print, is a note about adding boron to the soil for broccoli and beets. The recommendation is for 1 tablespoon of boron per 100 feet of row, or per 100 square feet.
Boron, an essential micronutrient for plant growth, tends to leach out of soils that receive a lot of rainfall, and the metro-Atlanta area usually (drought years excepted) gets at least 50 inches of rain each year. That counts as a lot.
The good news is that organic matter helps hold boron -- and other nutrients -- in the soil. This means that gardens to which organic matter has been added routinely are less likely to be deficient.
However, some plants need more Boron than others. Broccoli and beets are two that need more, but the Boron page of the Agronomic Library for Spectrum Analytics has a longer list of high-boron users, referred to as "high response crops," and the list includes other root vegetables in addition to home-garden staples like lettuce and corn. The page also includes a table of deficiency symptoms that might help a gardener figure out whether low boron is a problem in his or her garden.
I’m thinking about this now because I planted the carrot and beet seeds yesterday. Both are on the “high response crops” list, so I will be adding some to their space tomorrow (it is raining today).
Boron isn’t present in the usual NPK fertilizer formulations (which I will not be using again anyway), but it is available in the laundry-soap aisles of many grocery stores, as 20 Mule Team Borax. I never plant as much as 100 square feet of any one crop, so I adjust the amount of borax to match the approximate square footage that I’ve planted.
I usually add the borax to a full watering can and try to move the can smoothly over the planted area for even dispersal. It is also possible to just sprinkle the dry powder over the area, but any wind makes even distribution less likely.
I only add boron to the areas that are planted with “high response crops" each year, rather than the entire garden, because I don’t want to add too much. The problem with micronutrients is right in their category name, the prefix “micro.” They are useful only when present in very small amounts. Too much is as big a problem as too little, and getting rid of what’s already been added is much harder than adding more.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Fertilizer News
Last week a link to Tom Philpott’s article “New research: synthetic nitrogen destroys soil carbon, undermines soil health” showed up on Energy Bulletin, one of my favorite news sites. The article was originally published in Grist.
The article’s title pretty much says it all: a couple of recent (2007, 2009) studies by soil scientists working in Illinois (and a 2009 study by soil scientists in Iowa) support what some very old sources — published before WWII— had claimed, that use of synthetic fertilizers is bad for soil. What’s bad is that the readily available nitrogen speeds up growth of soil bacteria and fungi; as they grow, they do their usual job of decomposing organic matter more quickly, which results in soil with lower organic matter content.
It has been thought that agricultural soils on which plant debris had been left and then turned under would serve as storage for carbon, which could help mitigate climate change, but the new studies suggest that the industrial farms that rely on synthetic fertilizers are not going to be useful as carbon sinks.
In addition, soils that are lower in organic matter drain less well, hold less moisture, hold nutrients less well, and have lowered numbers of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. As the spaces normally held open by organic matter in the soil close because of the loss of that organic matter, the soil compacts and air is squeezed out. Roots need those air pockets, and so do many members of the community of micro- (and not so micro-) organisms that live in the soil.
I’m writing about this for a couple of reasons. The first is that not everyone who reads my blog reads the same websites that I do, so they might have missed this news. The other is that I had just about decided to save some money this year by using some synthetic fertilizer on my veggies. Obviously, I am going to have to change that plan (back to the cotton-seed meal, kelp meal, etc).
I would say that “Ignorance [was] bliss,” but I am glad to be able to avoid harming my garden’s soil. I may have to drive back out to that horse farm for another load of manure, though.
NOTE: The article discussed here is one in a series posted on Grist about soil nitrogen. Tom Philpott has written them all.
The article’s title pretty much says it all: a couple of recent (2007, 2009) studies by soil scientists working in Illinois (and a 2009 study by soil scientists in Iowa) support what some very old sources — published before WWII— had claimed, that use of synthetic fertilizers is bad for soil. What’s bad is that the readily available nitrogen speeds up growth of soil bacteria and fungi; as they grow, they do their usual job of decomposing organic matter more quickly, which results in soil with lower organic matter content.
It has been thought that agricultural soils on which plant debris had been left and then turned under would serve as storage for carbon, which could help mitigate climate change, but the new studies suggest that the industrial farms that rely on synthetic fertilizers are not going to be useful as carbon sinks.
In addition, soils that are lower in organic matter drain less well, hold less moisture, hold nutrients less well, and have lowered numbers of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. As the spaces normally held open by organic matter in the soil close because of the loss of that organic matter, the soil compacts and air is squeezed out. Roots need those air pockets, and so do many members of the community of micro- (and not so micro-) organisms that live in the soil.
I’m writing about this for a couple of reasons. The first is that not everyone who reads my blog reads the same websites that I do, so they might have missed this news. The other is that I had just about decided to save some money this year by using some synthetic fertilizer on my veggies. Obviously, I am going to have to change that plan (back to the cotton-seed meal, kelp meal, etc).
I would say that “Ignorance [was] bliss,” but I am glad to be able to avoid harming my garden’s soil. I may have to drive back out to that horse farm for another load of manure, though.
NOTE: The article discussed here is one in a series posted on Grist about soil nitrogen. Tom Philpott has written them all.
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