Design

I have such a hard time realizing how MUCH I need to fertilize vegetables, conditioned by the sparse habits of native plants and their parsimonious ways.  I always think I add plenty of compost, and dig in composted manure, and add Espoma organic fertilizer, etc. etc., but in looking at Jim Wilson's excellent new vegetable gardening book, obviously I'm not producing anything close to spinach and lettuce with the size of the leaves shown in the photos. Vegetables are definitely nutrient and water hogs, being domesticated, to be sure.  And then I see that he recommends a 1/2 cup of organic fertilizer at the base of each transplant.  Yikes.  No wonder my vegetables are modest in size. It'll be interesting to see how the tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables do in the raised beds this summer in the mountains.  The 'soil' is essentially straight compost with additional composted manure.  I'll take a sample for a soil test this weekend and see what I have....

A question in a recent kitchen gardening program has had me thinking about nutrients and vegetables again. Vegetables are so much more nutrient-intensive than perennials, shrubs, trees, or any 'landscape' plants, it's hard to realize sometimes how much they appreciate excellent, fertile soil to grow in. The person who asked the question wondered why her vegetables just seemed average, in their compost-enriched raised beds (but with no added fertilizer). Her soil test was 'fine' for vegetables, according to our state Ag Services Lab. But another participant had just told us about her two Early Girl tomato plants last season that produced so many tomatoes that she was giving them away to her friends, neighbors, people at her church, etc. But she was fertilizing her plants. Hmm. Most of my vegetable plants are a lot more in the average category - nice and productive, but nothing overwhelming. But I don't fertilize much either, after adding compost at each rot...

My mom's house in Texas was nestled on a woody, juniper-filled hillside in a upscale neighborhood in NW Austin, only marginally "landscaped" above and below the house. The deck extended over a scruffy lawn (no sun, of course), so from the deck, it was easy to throw the odd banana peel or lettuce leaf into the scrubby forest. She wasn't a gardener, so there was no need to create compost, but I think it appealed to her thrifty ways and sense of environmentalism. Her mother was a gardener, though, so maybe she had composted back when the vegetable garden was a source of food for a good bit of the winter, after canning. I still remember being impressed by the jars of canned beans and tomatoes in Grandma's cellar and the vegetable gardens and berry patches that she had when I was a child. Even before I was a gardener, I enjoyed putting our vegetable and fruit scraps in a compost heap, being environmentally-inclined myself. We had established one within one of our s...

After pulling out spent beans & tomatoes a few days ago, I started readying those spots for fall plants. I like to add more compost, a bit of organic fertilizer, and lime, depending on how each block looks (not very scientific or orderly), but some vegetables are more demanding than others, and almost all vegetables are much more fussy than the tough perennials, shrubs, and trees that we like to grow in our garden. Spinach (along with beets and chard) prefer a much more neutral soil (almost 6.5-7.0) than ours tend to be here in the SE, so adding more lime is helpful, at least over the long run, although it would have been best to have added it some months ago! Pelletized lime is the easiest to use in the garden. In fact, one of the harder things I've had to learn about vegetable-growing is that vegetables tend to be nutrient and water 'hogs' -- and have generally been selected to grow tasty fruits and leaves for us to consume, and take up plenty of nutrients and water i...