Peppers, Epsom Salt

there are other solutions that don't require spraying every week.

D
Reply to
David Hare-Scott
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I'm all ears! er .. eyes!

Reply to
Natural (Smoking Gun) Girl

I didn't mean solutions as in solute plus solvent I meant ways of keeping your plants healthy.

Foliar feeding is handy if you want to provide a quick boost or if you want to diagnose a deficiency. For example, you can apply a differerent mineral solution to each of a set of plants and see the outcome of each quite soon. But the effect doesn't last long. This is because the plant absorbs via the leaves and into the vascular system but if there is no more liquid spray (probably a few hours after application) it has to stop. The overspray will drip into the soil and be absorbed by the roots as well but being soluble much will leached out when you water unless your soil has good binding capacity.

If you make your soil healthy with the right minerals, organic matter and microbes and you won't need foliar feeding.

D
Reply to
David Hare-Scott

ohh ok One thing I've noticed is I don't see any more slugs on my plants since I've started spraying them. I wonder if that's just a coincidence?

Reply to
Natural (Smoking Gun) Girl

sorry this seems so frustrating to you, but there's a lot of things that the rest of us don't know about what you are doing and so in order to try to help it is important to find out as much of the history and methods you are using. when i ask a question i want a specific answer to that question. if you think you're repeating yourself you might not be getting the point i'm after. already below you've revealed a few things that i didn't note from before so they can help longer term. :) patience... the more complete you can be the more it helps.

onwards...

have you ever been able to grow tomatoes there at all? you say you've planted different varieties but have you tried cherry tomatoes or smaller varieties?

have you ever tried growing tomatoes (patio or cherry tomatoes) in a brand new pot using potting soil and not using water from the tap?

for an experiment get a bucket, put a few holes in the bottom, fill it with potting soil and put a patio or cherry tomato plant in there and keep it watered using distilled or spring water (i.e. don't use tap water or water from the lake). fertilize it lightly only after it gets growing for a month.

if you can keep that plant alive then at least we know it's not you... :)

i still think this will help overall for your garden apart from everything else.

your soil is sandy loam? the soil tests should tell you what type of soil it is and how much clay (the percentage). if clay is too low then you're low pH water will be leaching nutrients from a sandy soil.

test your water. find out what you are up against (at the rate of 30 minutes at so many gallons per minute) each day.

i'm not sure if irrigating at different times would help too. is your irrigation system buried so that the water isn't being heated up at any point along the route from the lake to the garden?

is it being stored in a tank that is in the sun or does it come straight from the lake to the garden? (to adjust pH some folks run acidic water through a crushed limestone gravel bed, this works well for a while, but the gravel can eventually get a coating on it which then decreases the adjustment so after that it needs to be stirred. a much, much easier approach is to use earthworms and limestone grit. the worms use the pieces of grit in their gizzards to grind things up. along with their calcium secretion glands they are very good for maintaining pH.

important...

have you ever lifted a plant and looked at the root system? compared a healthy plant with a wilted plant? perhaps you have root knot nematodes (sandy soil ...)?

it may not be wilt. just curious what you've examined and if you've sent a wilted plant in for diagnosis? if so, what was the exact name they gave?

ok, how are you rotating? how large an area? have you ever double dug an area?

if you have another area far enough away that has never been gardened put a tomato in that spot and see what happens (even if it doesn't get enough light you can still examine the root structure later on or see if it wilts in the same manner).

not much actual nutrition in fallen leaves.

your soil is crying out for a more balanced diet. :)

is wilt a fungal, bacterial or viral disease?

if it is a fungal disease then covering the ground for that long a period of time and not encouraging bacterial populations is not going to help...

the sun sterilizes the surface of the soil (UV rays). earthworms will also help change the bacterial and pH characteristics of a soil. also growing plants will help. if you can switch to planting a mixed cover crop for those months and then turn it a few weeks before planting the garden i think you'll eventually be in for much better results.

once you learn more about what is going on (is it a fungal disease, bacterial or viral) then you can also adjust your practices to encourage the other factors to reduce the problem.

again, another very limited nutrient material. perhaps also too oriented towards fungal (like covering with plastic for months at a time will accomplish).

if you can afford fertilizer you can afford a bag or two of alfalfa pellets or alfalfa meal. top dress your garden with that and lightly mix it with the top few inches of soil. mulch lightly over that. in combination with added clay (if you don't have enough) some agricultural lime (probably needed) you'll greatly increase the bacterial and fungal counts. if you do this along with adding a bit of composted cow manure and other known good quality compost then you'll help to add more competition to disease organisms. this is best done a few weeks to a month before planting.

"I have tried it" what is "it"? compost or cover crops or ?

there's a lot of history we don't know about yet. we have no idea how long this garden has been going, if you've ever been able to grow tomatoes there, what the light situation is like, etc.

i'm trying to find out. :) if you answer each question i ask (bear with me, but each question is important because it gives me a better idea of what you are doing).

already we are getting a clearer picture of what's up...

do you use any mulch, covers or what?

likely California Wonder (the most common green bell pepper found in stores).

you're welcome. i enjoy problem solving and perhaps others can learn something too. i don't consider it a waste of time, but it speeds things up if you answer each question even if you think i should know the answer already. not everyone reads the backstory or the past articles and someone far wiser than i may see something obvious that i haven't...

as for growing perfect produce. well i can tell the bugs which plants to eat and they listen. just joking... every year i learn more and i've been growing houseplants and gardening for more than 40 years. the more i learn the more i appreciate what a fine world we have.

getting back to your problem with tomatoes...

i think i would lay off using the brewing leavings and instead use those in a compost pile (to reduce the yeast populations and to introduce a wider variety of bacteria and fungi to the compost, which then gets added to the gardens). i would add a little lime to the compost pile, and use dirt and composted cow manure from a different site to innoculate the pile.

you want to encourage a wider population of soil creatures than what you currently have. many of them will help fight an imbalance, but you want to get these soil creatures from a whole different location and source than what you have now.

if you want a prime example of how this type of process works look at the problem of c. diff in people. it's a very nasty bug of the digestive tract. very resistant to drugs. yet they can treat it in a fairly inexpensive manner by taking a healthy person's poop and putting that in the infected person's digestive system (simplifying the description, but that's about what they do). c.diff almost killed my aunt. before this treatment was made known, she was not really ever fully recovered... now they know a lot more and more people are able to be treated.

garden soil is a whole community much like the digestive system. if you can find the imbalance and correct it that is good, but you might also need to give it a boost with a new community of organisms to provide competition with whatever is causing disease.

a few things you are doing is pushing your soil community towards the fungal life, but also certain types of fungi (yeasts and those that thrive in low light and warmth) does that sound familiar? like the understory of a tomato plant in summer humidity?

stop smothering the soil for months at a time. plant a mixed cover crop and turn it under about a month before planting. at that time add some lime, new compost from a known good source (innoculated with soil from a known good area not at all close to yours). if you can get native earthworms (not composting worms) to add at the time you turn the cover crop and add the lime (add the lime first and water it before adding worms) this will help things a great deal. clay too. don't forget that if your soil is too much sand. a little bit goes a long ways.

another thing, is that earthworms (not composting worms) don't tend to hang out in poor sandy soils. they like a little clay and they like a little grit and they like green stuff up top and cool enough temperatures below. give them grit, green stuff and a bit of clay and they will work for free to help you keep your pH up. they are great garden helpers. a light layer of mulch after the ground has warmed up enough to plant will also help give them a bit of protection from the heat and drying out. composting worms are ok too, but they are more up top creatures and what i would want to encourage in your situation is actual soil dwelling worms.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Billy wrote: ...

we have birdbaths but no feeding as then the birds have to forage. we grow plenty of seed sources and bugs are all about. i'll continue to try to train the birds this year to eat japanese beetles and other bugs that they don't seem to be picking up on (rhubarb bugs and the stink bugs). except i've yet to find a stink bug on any plants... dunno where they hang out other than in the house when it gets cooler.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

My black oil sunflower seed feeder is for small birds (mostly chickadees, chookadees?). They can be extremely fussy about what they eat, and may toss away as many as 20 seeds before finding one that is just right for them. Some seeds fall to the ground, and larger birds come to take advantage of the free food. Large, and small, I then see them scratching up the yard. Salatin mentioned in "Salad Bar Beef" that birds will venture about 200 ft. from cover to find food.

Reply to
Billy

There are two basic groups of cover crops: legumes and grains. You may choose to plant one or the other, or combine the two types, depending on your goal.

Grains, such as oats, BUCKWHEAT and winter RYE, are very good for adding bulky organic material to the soil (increasing water retention).

Legumes contribute nitrogen in addition to organic matter. Where soils are depleted of nitrogen, a nutrient essential for plant growth, leguminous cover crops help restore fertility. =====

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils (for example, earthworms), there is a whole world of soil organisms that you cannot see unless you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only then do the tiny, microscopic organisms?bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes?appear, and in numbers that are nothing less than staggering. A mere teaspoon of good garden soil, as measured by microbial geneticists, contains a billion invisible bacteria, several yards of equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few dozen nematodes.

The common denominator of all soil life is that every organism needs energy to survive. While a few bacteria, known as chemosynthesizers, derive energy from sulfur, nitrogen, or even iron compounds, the rest have to eat something containing carbon in order to get the energy they need to sustain life. Carbon may come from organic material supplied by plants, waste products produced by other organisms, or the bodies of other organisms. The first order of business of all soil life is obtaining carbon to fuel metabolism?it is an eat-and-be-eaten world, in and on soil.

Most organisms eat more than one kind of prey, so if you make a diagram of who eats whom in and on the soil, the straight-line food chain instead becomes a series of food chains linked and cross-linked to each other, creating a web of food chains, or a soil food web. Each soil environment has a different set of organisms and thus a different soil food web.

Most gardeners think of plants as only taking up nutrients through root systems and feeding the leaves. Few realize that a great deal of the energy that results from photosynthesis in the leaves is actually used by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. A good analogy is perspiration, a human's exudate.

Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts, and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's root tips grow. All this secretion of exudates and sloughing-off of cells takes place in the rhizosphere, a zone immediately around the roots, extending out about a tenth of an inch, or a couple of millimeters (1 millimeter = 1/25 inch). The rhizosphere, which can look like a jelly or jam under the electron microscope, contains a constantly changing mix of soil organisms, including bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and even larger organisms. All this ³life" competes for the exudates in the rhizosphere, or its water or mineral content.

At the bottom of the soil food web are bacteria and fungi, which are attracted to and consume plant root exudates. In turn, they attract and are eaten by bigger microbes, specifically nematodes and protozoa (remember the amoebae, paramecia, flagellates, and ciliates you should have studied in biology?), who eat bacteria and fungi (primarily for carbon) to fuel their metabolic functions. Anything they don't need is excreted as wastes, which plant roots are readily able to absorb as nutrients. How convenient that this production of plant nutrients takes place right in the rhizosphere, the site of root-nutrient absorption.

At the center of any viable soil food web are plants. Plants control the food web for their own benefit, an amazing fact that is too little understood and surely not appreciated by gardeners who are constantly interfering with Nature's system. Studies indicate that individual plants can control the numbers and the different kinds of fungi and bacteria attracted to the rhizosphere by the exudates they produce. During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the plant and the exudates it produces.

Soil bacteria and fungi are like small bags of fertilizer, retaining in their bodies nitrogen and other nutrients they gain from root exudates and other organic matter (such as those sloughed-off root-tip cells). Carrying on the analogy, soil protozoa and nematodes act as ³fertilizer spreaders" by releasing , the nutrients locked up in the bacteria and fungi ³fertilizer bags." The nematodes and protozoa in the soil come along and eat the bacteria and fungi in the rhizosphere. They digest what they need to survive and excrete excess carbon and other nutrients as waste.

Left to their own devices, then, plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved. Soil life provides the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates. ======

Your garden soil shouldn't be more than 10% (by volume), or less than 5% (by weight) organic material.

Garden soil should be 30% - 40% sand, 30% - 40% silt, and 20% - 30% clay. You can check your soil by scraping away the organic material on top of the ground and then take a vertical sample of your soil to 12 in. (30 cm) deep (rectangular or circular hole). Mix this with water in an appropriately large glass (transparent) jar. The sand will settle out quickly, the silt in a couple of hours, and the clay within a day. The depth of the layer in relationship to the total (layer/total = % of composition) is the percent that fraction has in the soil.

Garden soil needs a constant input of nutrients, i.e. carbon, e.g. brown leaves, and nitrogen, e.g. manure in a ratio of C/N of 25 - 30. This is the same ratio you will want in a compost pile.

-----

Let it Rot!: The Gardener's Guide to Composting (Third Edition) (Storey's Down-to-Earth Guides) by Stu Campbell

p.39

Compostable Material Average C/N

Alder or ash leaves ........................ 25

Grass clippings ........................... 25

Leguminous plants (peas, beans,soybeans) ........................... 15

Manure with bedding ....................... 23

Manure .................................... 15

Oak leaves ................................ 50

Pine needles .............................. 60-100

Sawdust................................. 150-500

Straw, cornstalks and cobs ............... 50-100

Vegetable trimmings ...................... 25

Aged Chicken Manure  .......................7

Alfalfa ................................. 12

Newspaper............................. 175

-----

Reply to
Billy

Billy wrote: ...

ah, you got around to reading it. what did you think? i preferred it much over his more recent book. seemed more practical and more descriptive of what he actually does for the beef part of his operation.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

i've been around pig farms too. never wish to return. bad enough to make me not want to eat pork again. but good BBQ is hard to resist. there are ways of doing pig that aren't quite so smelly and nasty. permaculturists are able to run them in small groups to clean up woodland tree leftovers. a little smell, then shift them to a new spot. use good electric fences and rotate regularly so the area can recover. sounds possible for people with more patience than i have.

deer here are the same way. if we get deep enough snows in the late winter they'll come through in large groups and browse the cedar trees. i've had them bed down about 30ft from where i am now. i can hear them chuffing and wandering around in the night.

that is a good thing. the other aspect of having a mother hen for the chicks is that she'll help them figure out what is good to do and protect them while they are growing up better than if you just get chicks and let them wander around and have to figure it all out for themselves. follow the leader is much more efficient.

good luck! i was drooling over acreage the other evening.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

My neighbour had a job muckong out the stalls at a local pig farm for a while. After a few months he got a get a better job so he quit. Of course he wore rubber boots at the pig farm. After the boots had been scrubbed with strong soap and disinfectant and left in the sun for a week his wife issued instructions that if he wanted to keep them they could go in the shed. If he wanted to keep his boots in or near the house he had to get a new pair.

D
Reply to
David Hare-Scott

It is mostly about raising beef, which has no appeal to me. I just skimmed through the book, and took what I found interesting. I didn't find anything damning in his methods.

Reply to
Billy

Oh I know, I don't mean to sound ungratefull

Yes the first year we lived here there was no problem. (8 years ago)

THe only thing that gets watered from the lake is the gardens. All of the potted stuff and the green house get watered from tap water that I let sit out before I use it. I thought distilled water was a no no.

What the hell is a worm? Seriously I have not seen one in 8 years.

Don't know what you mean by double dug? The gardens are 35" x 4"

Well ya your right, I guess all the good stuff goes into the beer :)

Compost

Sorry for the delay in responding. We had a quick trip out of town MJ

Reply to
mjciccarel

Ah, beginners luck ;O)

Do you let it sit for 24 hours as you would for a fish tank? That should blow off any chlorine worries.

bird is just trying to get identify the problem. If your plants grow well with distilled water, the house/lake water IS your problem. Distilled water doesn't have any minerals, and volatile compounds should have been blown off by the heat (chlorine for example), leaving you with a small residue of aromatic compounds, but probably not as much as straight lake water, unless it is a very pristine lake. Most water is OK, as long as it isn't high in salts, which you would taste.

You might ask the cooperative extension office about the lake's pH. They would probably know.

Look at the chart on

Ouuuuughaaaaa. ³Danger, Will Robinson!² Houston, we have a problem. On second thought, we don't have a problem, your soil be day-ed.

Sorry, I came in late to the show, but if it isn't too late get some organic material into your soil ASAP. This is also where the 10-10-10 comes in. It doesn't support the soil ecology. Hmmmmmmm OK, people grow hydoponically so you should be able to grow without worms, but it will be more expensive.

You won't have to water as often as hydroponically, since the soil wil hold some moisture, but you would be feeding at each watering.

Check with a nursery that has hydroponic supplies. As you might guess, I've never done this before, but it would rule out if it is your soil, or if you are overwatering (root rot).

Sounds like salt! hmmmmmmmmmm

You might shake up some soil with water, wait 24 hr for solids to settle, and then filter the clear fluid into a glass jar, and then let the water evaporate. If you have salts, you'll see them.

That's a pretty small garden. it's almost an entire sq. ft. ;O)

Double digging is digging a trench in the garden. Then you dig the trench again. The material that came out the first time goes in first, and that is covered with the soil that came out the second time. The idea is to increase the area in which the roots can grow easily. This is done for the entire garden.

Not to worry, you can catch it on the way out.

Lightly indeed. Alfalfa meal can fry a plant just as effectively as chicken manure.

So everything else grows OK, it's just the tomatoes that you have the problems with?

Reply to
Billy

Verticuillum might also have that effect and travel with the soil - now it's probably travelling with the pot. It's rather a to get rid of....

Reply to
Ecnerwal

ok,

using a word like "wilt" is too general. in all of the disease of tomato keys there are more than one "wilt"s, there are: bacterial, viral and environmental.

in your disease identification process have you had the same diagnosis each year? pictures? records? written down the name of the species?

ok. good to know.

for a test it's fine. use bottled spring water if that sounds better (the label of the bottled spring water i can get locally for cheap is sourced from a municiple water supply in Columbus Ohio of all places. doesn't sound like a spring to me, but oh well... (bad puns alert :) )).

what i'm trying to figure out from that test is if your light and watering habits will support tomato life apart from the system you have in the gardens. the combination of soils/water/diseases and potentially irrigation system aren't working for tomatoes, so perhaps moving that one crop to large potted containers is the answer. if the test grows fine, then you can switch to tap water after a while and see what happens. if that works then you will likely have some kind of crop from that setup and we've sidestepped the larger garden problem for now and gotten you a tomato to finish.

next year you can then do the same thing with tomatoes in large containers, but add a test of using a few containers in combination with lake water. if those do poorly or well that answers a question, but perhaps it will take more than a single season for the lake water to have the negative effect. so it's not a conclusive test by far, but it continues to gain information you didn't have before.

some people can grow some things and not others...

...

ah, see this is another wider system diagnostic. but perhaps you are in an area where worms are not native. i don't know.

can you find a local master gardener who has a good knowlege of the area? they should know. if the answer is that there should be worms about then it's a good indication you are doing things to your soil which isn't encouraging it.

if you haven't gotten a certain id of the problem then we could be wasting time. use google and do a search on "tomato wilt" and then use the site that comes up from any university that (Cornell's seems to be decent) will let you work on identifying the culprit. if it is an actual disease and not a part of the physical set up. that is the complexity of your situation is that we still aren't sure if it is a general wilt from having sandy soil and not enough moisture holding capacity of the garden (so the plants can't keep up with the heat of the summer and just collapse) or if it is a disease. or the pH is too low or ...

note also that there is a pretty good list of different varieties to try. most of them i've never heard of. :)

it is a method of digging down two layers. what it does is let you examine the soil structure other than the top few inches you might see when planting or weeding. the other point is that it lets you see if there are worms and drainage down deeper, how dry the soil is, if there are any layers which might be limiting the root growth (if your tomatoes can't get roots down very deep because there is a hard sandy layer (common in some areas) then they could be wilting because of the heat and lack of water along with other problems.

generally, it's a practice that few do these days (it's a lot of work :) ), but it gives you a chance to observe the soil you are depending upon for growing something. i recommend it as a test trench across a garden every so many feet just to make sure the soil is not different. you take the top layer of soil off, set it to the side and then dig another layer from underneath that and put it to the other side. if you are reversing soil layers then you bury the one with the other, and if not, vice-versa.

as a method to isolate diseased soil from plants it can also be useful. in that you can dig a fairly deep trench and bury the infected topsoil (reducing disease causing organisms that come in contact with plants). by changing the environment of the disease organisms it can also help moderate them (some don't like lower oxygen levels, others do better down deeper (some fungi don't do all that good up top, etc.).

it's like hitting a major catastrophe switch for the soil community. so not recommended if you already have healthy garden soil, but unlikely to hurt if you have a rather troubled garden. if you reverse soil layers and then add compost from a known good source to the top layer (after the switch is done) then you've pretty much started a whole different garden system. add a bit more organic material, some clay, some lime, mix, water and plant and you might find that certain crops improve. if you can find native earth worms. harvest some of those (keep a separate bin of them that can't be raided by animals and then you can use these as a supplement too) and add them. use a light top mulch (once the soil warms up especially where you are growing peppers/tomatoes/eggplant/ okra).

i also use deep trenches to bury plant debris. instead of throwing useful material away, i let the fungi, worms, and other soil critters have at it, eventually it gets turned into plant nutrients.

almost every garden i do these days is in heavy soil so they can all use more organic matter and better drainage. some of these gardens are also in flood prone areas. if i can bury several inches of chunks of wood under there then that helps lift these gardens above the likely flood stage. over time that woody material gets digested and has to be replaced, but in heavy clay that can last a fairly long time (it turns into peat-like material and acts as a worm refuge during the hot parts of the summer and the really cold parts of winter).

good test too.

...

it's a pretty limited diet. i know kids who were raised on macaroni and cheese and hot dogs but eventually they figured out they like to eat other things too. i've even seen them eat a salad.

Billy pokes me about alfalfa meal being a hot agent, but my whole comment includes the fact that this should be done some time in advance (if you are mixing it in the top few inches of soil).

after reading more i see there are alfalfa related diseases so perhaps better to avoid alfalfa unless run through a hot compost pile or through worm composting. i haven't seen any problems yet using green manures so they are what i consider the best approach.

ok. but keep at it. learn how to make a well balanced compost and your garden will be helped by that. if you don't add some clay then it will get used up fairly quickly (an inch or more per season would not be uncommon) that's a lot of compost. just using it once and saying it didn't help is probably also common. add some larger pieces of wood chips, add some clay and give the pile some green stuff of varied kinds and over the longer term your garden soil will improve and like i've already said too you can use some lime and that will give worms a chance to stick around.

...

i mean, during the growing season, not just the black plastic through the winter.

...

no problem, i'm not on a schedule here. :)

songbird

Reply to
songbird

...

the worst thing is to win the first outing at a casino...

...

yeah... i have that problem too in places. i've made progress over the past few years.

one garden last year had zero worms when tested (pile organic materials on top, water, wait a few days, see what's in there). i added worm poo and worms to it when planting the tomatoes in there last year (down fairly deep in that clay too, heavy digging). this spring i had a wheelbarrow full of bark pieces and wood chips and no place to put them quickly so i dumped them in the middle of that garden. today i finally was able to check it out and see if there were any worms in or under that pile and there was. i was surprised as i didn't see them other places i'd done the same treatment. only thing i can figure is that garden didn't get so heavily flooded last summer and also had a little more organic material in it to start.

the journey continues... :)

somehow i have to convince Ma that refuges are good things to have in each garden.

i'm not sure what the problem is, it might still be a combination of things. irrigation in sandy soil may not be enough when it gets really hot. that first season may have been cooler. etc.

unlikely... (i think he'd see signs of that in the rest of the garden plants, especially after 8 years of irrigation)

...

note that double digging generally does NOT recommend switching soil layers. nor do i. i only recommend it when there is a problem and a reset of the soil community may help (along with using fresh compost and worms along with other appropriate amendments).

i also use it as a learning about the soil observational thing. if i'm putting work into a garden i want to know what i'm dealing with. i don't double dig every year. only new gardens and other gardens i'm burying things deeply in and once in a while test trenches to see how things are going. for the heavy clay here it's way too much work to double dig a whole garden that often. not when we have several thousand sqft of gardens.

no tilling. not anymore if i can help it. using a shovel and leaving larger clumps destroys much less of the soil community. i only break clumps on the surface if the seed bed needs a finer grain (and only in the planting rows and not the whole garden). saves a lot of work too not having to break all that up.

...

see below (not done when planting, but before).

...big snip...

i think so, but there was some talk about bell peppers being too thin walled (could be a timing thing or lack of nutrients or ...).

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Thing is that tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes are all members of the family Solanaceae. If any of these are grown in the same soil with no harm, then it is not wilt.

Reply to
Billy

Yes everything else grows just fine. You mentioned Hydroponics, I have that in the green house and grow my tomatoes there. I just can't grow them in d irt apparently.

Reply to
mjciccarel

Very strange. Oh little mysteries of life.

Do you find that you can control the water absorbed by the tomatoes so that they don't turn into water balloons, diluting their flavor?

Reply to
Billy

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