Ten Pound Tomato Grow Organic – Eat Better

September 6, 2010

The 3 Unknown Major Nutrients Your Garden Needs

Filed under: Garden Soil,Newsletter Archive — Perry Droast @ 7:03 pm

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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.

July 29, 2009

Want Great Tomatoes? Double-dig Your Garden Plot.

Filed under: Garden Preparation,Garden Soil — Perry Droast @ 2:02 pm

The activity of building the fertility of your garden soil does more to improve yield, taste, and nutritional content than any other two activities combined.

You’re about to learn one of the most important things you can do to improve your soil and your garden. Once you do this to your garden, you’ve taken a big step towards producing more and better tasting tomatoes. Better yet, you’ll improve all the other fruits and vegetables you grow at the same time.

Double-dig all your garden plots and you’ll grow the best garden you’ve ever grown.

So what exactly does the term “double-dig” mean?
Double-digging your garden soil means loosening the soil thoroughly to a depth of 12 to 24 inches. The closer to 24” the better. Typically, the first time you do this, most gardeners are able to get 18 inches deep. If you already have good soil structure in your garden, you’ll see improved growth and yield in your garden. If your soil is compacted or hard clay, double-digging makes all the difference in the world, and you should see some really good gains in productivity and growth in your garden.

This is probably the most strenuous activity you’ll undertake in your garden. Fortunately, you can do it in stages, and it pays big dividends for years to come.

Warning: Check with your doctor before undertaking any strenuous activity including double-digging your garden plots.

In order to double-dig properly, you’ll need a garden spade, a d-handle garden fork, and a wheelbarrow or a few 5-gallon buckets. A tarp could substitute instead of the wheelbarrow or the buckets. Just as important, you need some organic compost to dig into the soil as you go through the double-dig process.

As a side note, I don’t recommend using a rototiller to try to bypass the hard work. They churn the soil so completely, they tend to ruin the soil structure actually hindering maximum production in the long run. Beyond that, they can also hurt the earthworm population in your garden as well. Regardless of what you heard as a child, when an earthworm is chopped in two, it does not  grow into two worms.

How to double-dig the right way
First, you should lay out the boundaries of the garden plot or bed you’d like to start using. It doesn’t matter if it’s a brand new spot you’ve never gardened before or an established growing bed. Either way, start by laying out a garden hose around the outside.

I recommend building garden beds or plots no wider than 5 feet across with access on both sides. This way you never have to walk on the growing portion of your garden, except during the double-dig process. During the double-dig you do need to walk on the portion you haven’t yet dug. Fortunately you thoroughly loosen the soil you’ve walked on as you go. Walking on the garden compacts the soil like driving a tractor on a field does, except not quite as much.

First step
Water your new garden bed thoroughly for a couple of hours. Then let the water soak in for 2 to 3 days before digging.

Start by digging a trench roughly one foot wide and one spade deep, along one edge (preferably the short side) of the garden bed. Place the dirt in a wheelbarrow or some 5-gallon buckets so you can move the dirt to the far end of the bed during the last step in the process.

Next, lay a 2 to 4 inch thick layer of organic compost in the bottom of the trench. Now pierce the dirt in the bottom of the trench you just created loosening the dirt and partially mixing the compost in by using the d-handle garden fork. Your trench should now be approximately 9 inches to one foot deep with another 9 inches to one foot of loosened dirt and compost mixture in the bottom.

Before doing any more digging, spread another 2 to 4 inches of organic compost on top of the rest of the garden plot.

The magic begins
Here’s where the real magic of double-digging takes place. Move over to the next one-foot wide section.

Using the spade, take the dirt from the second one-foot wide row and fill the trench you just created, mixing in the compost as you go. Next, loosen the soil in the bottom of the second trench, just like you did in the bottom of the first trench, after covering it with 2 to 4 inches of compost.

Now repeat the process until you end up with an empty trench, one-foot deep, at the other boundary of your garden bed. After composting this row and loosening the soil in the bottom, move the soil you removed from the first trench over to this last trench and fill it using the soil from the first trench. Cover this last one-foot wide row with compost and dig it in using the garden fork.

You’ve just created something your average gardener probably doesn’t realize they need. A new garden bed full of loose soil 24 inches deep. Because you’ve now injected air deep into the soil, your plants roots will now grow quickly, easily, and much deeper than ever before. The air helps plant roots grow very quickly, encourages soil microbes to multiply, helping to create good soil structure and improving nutrient uptake in the plants at the same time.

Magical garden soil created
By loosening the soil so much deeper than most gardeners ever do, you’ve created conditions where plants can be placed closer together, where they’ll produce better due to more available nutrients, and the soil won’t require as many amendments or fertilizers like required in a more conventional garden.

You are now one step closer to a highly productive garden or micro-farm. Fortunately, you won’t need to double-dig again for 4 or 5 years unless you walk on the garden bed itself, re-compacting the soil. You will need to loosen the soil each season and add organic compost, however this will go much faster and easier than the initial double-dig process you just completed.

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