Ten Pound Tomato Grow Organic – Eat Better

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Tomato Invasion Newsletter #6

What’s with the pale yellow leaves with the green veins?

And why does that tomato have a big brown patch on it?

If your garden soil is short on magnesium, the leaves on your plants could turn yellow while the veins stay green. While that may be a nice look for a tropical plant in a pot because it’s supposed to look that way, the plants in your vegetable garden shouldn’t. And even if one plant in your garden looks that way, your soil doesn’t contain enough of at least one of the ‘other three major nutrients’ necessary for healthy plant growth.

The ‘other’ major nutrients your garden needs…besides N-P-K

In addition to nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, your garden needs lots of…

Sulfur – for fast root growth while plants are young and to help protein content

Calcium – to support cellular division, plant growth, and fruit development

Magnesium – essential element of chlorophyl while balancing calcium

Calcium also buffers the soil PH and helps your plants utilize other nutrients as well. Magnesium and calcium also need to be in balance with each other for plants to take up and utilize many other nutrients found in the soil.

In effect, the amount of these three major nutrients in your soil need to be balanced for your garden to grow like it should.

Why are these considered major and not minor nutrients?

The classification of major vs. minor relates to the amount necessary. Relatively large amounts of sulfur, calcium, and magnesium are required for your garden to grow strong healthy plants. When plenty of these three nutrients are available, you get wonderful deep-green shrubs, beautiful flowers, and abundant produce.

Minor or micronutrients are only required in trace amounts whereas major nutrients are needed in much larger amounts.

What happens if the nutrient levels in your garden soil aren’t enough?

Some crops require more of one nutrient than others. For instance, potatoes need fairly high levels of sulfur to produce bumper crops. Sulfur deficiency also mimics nitrogen deficiency causing leaves to turn yellow. Without enough sulfur, not only can your plants leaves turn yellow, they may curl upwards too.

Soils deficient in calcium causes blossom-end rot in tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Even if there’s enough calcium, if your soil lacks magnesium, the results are still the same. These two elements help balance each other out. If you don’t have both, you may as well not have either. Calcium deficiency also causes black and dying tips on beans, similar to blossom-end rot, except showing up in a different way.

Lack of magnesium can also show up as yellow areas in the leaves although the veins in the leaves can still be green. Low magnesium also causes forked roots on beets and miniature potatoes.

So if someone sees yellow leaves in your garden and tells you to add nitrogen, you now know it can also be any of these three other lesser known major nutrients that are missing.

How do you ensure proper levels in your soil?

Before you go any further, you should get your soil tested. It’s the only way to really know what your soil needs and what it doesn’t. Once you get your test results back you can go about restoring the proper balance of nutrients.

For acidic soil, to raise your calcium levels, you could apply some lime. Dolomitic lime contains lots of calcium and magnesium. Other types of lime are also great sources of calcium. It’s not a good idea to indiscriminately apply lime though. Apply the proper amount based on your test results.

Too much dolomitic lime and your soil could actually end up with too much magnesium, which isn’t much better than not having enough. Soil nutrients are kind of like vitamins. Not enough isn’t good. Too much of some types can be toxic.

Don’t apply lime of any kind if your soil is alkaline.

For alkaline soil, gypsum is a great source of calcium and sulfur. Other types of rock powder, like greensand or rock phosphate can also be really beneficial to your soil. Not only do they provide calcium and magnesium, they also supply plenty of other trace minerals which transfer through the plants into your food. Unless your soil doesn’t show any mineral deficiencies when tested, you should apply a good load of rock powder to your garden once every five years.

Because most farmland and garden soil are deficient of a wide range of minerals, adding some rock powder garden supplements may not only eliminate major nutrient deficiencies in your garden, they’ll take care of your trace minerals too.

And you can always apply sulfur and magnesium individually. Another good source of minerals many people overlook is tree leaves. When the leaves fall off the trees in the autumn, collect as many as you can. Trees pull up minerals from the subsoil through their deep root systems and deposit many of the minerals in their leaves.

Mulch, add compost, and if needed…sulfur, calcium, and magnesium

So mulch with some leaves, and compost the rest. Your garden will love you for it.

By using liberal amounts of organic compost, mulching with leaves, and judicious application of other organic garden amendments like rock powder, your garden should never suffer from deficiencies of the ‘3 other major nutrients’ your garden needs and nobody ever told you about.