Looking at the dirt in our backyard, DH said, “Hey, I just figured out why North Carolinians are called Tarheels.” The dirt is black, black as tar. It’s black from the decomposition of prehistoric swamp millennia ago. The guy at the Southern States Farm Cooperative said the soil hereabouts is so rich, “You can throw a rock on it and it will grow into a boulder.” They’ve been growing cotton for decades, maybe centuries, on the field behind us and have only managed to deplete it to a rich cocoa brown. In the mind of a gardener, black soil is nutrient-rich soil, ready for seeds and plants. But, I don’t trust this black color and we’re going to add manure just to be sure the dirt has what vegetables need to put out high yields. I can always throw in lime later if I’ve overdone the nitrogen.
And I can’t tell from looking at it whether it’s alkaline or acidic. DH put a bit of it on the tip of his tongue and declared that it’s alkaline and we’ll have to add some sulfur. I always wondered how ancient farmers tested their soil balance. DH’s Daddy showed him this trick and his Daddy must have shown him, on back.
I bought a pH meter anyway. The pH scale measures the amount of hydrogen (acid-forming) ions in the soil. There are cheap little pH test kits but they aren’t very accurate and you would have to buy one every year. So it’s better to invest $13.49 in a gizmo that works all year, every year. I stuck it in all over the yard and it read 7.0 no matter where I put it so I thought it must be broken. Inside I dipped it vinegar and the needle slammed over to acidic. Wow! We’ve got sandy loam and nearly perfect pH!
Almost all vegetables thrive in a pH between 6.0 and 7.0 which is the neutral middle of the scale. Like Goldilocks, they want a meal that is “jussst right,” not too acidic and not too alkaline. Plants need more than hydrogen to thrive however. There are 16 elements that are essential to plant growth (in order of importance): Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, zinc, boron, copper, iron, chloride, manganese and molybdenum.
You can see how growing plants got twisted into a chemical experiment and people thought it didn’t matter where you got these elements – hey, we can pull them out of oil! The numbers on a bag of fertilizer stand for the percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potash (potassium chloride) contained in them. A bag that reads 5-10-10 is telling you it’s got percentages in a ratio of 5% Nitrogen, 10% Phosphate and 10% Potash. The bulk of the bag can be fillers like sand or ground up corn cobs so you look like you’re getting a lot of something and don’t spread it too richly and burn up your plants.
Again, there are relatively cheap kits that will sort of measure the first seven, primary elements in your soil and from there you figure out whether you need 12-6-6 or 6-18-6 to bring your dirt into an ideal balance. I have collected soil samples from the four-corners of my garden and given them to my local County Extension Service who will send them to the state agricultural lab and send me back a complete detailed analysis of my soil – in four to six weeks. This service is FREE! And I’ll find out if I need to sprinkle some 20-Mule Team Borax (boron) or Epson Salts (magnesium) on my beds.
Every chemical component in store-bought fertilizers can be introduced into your garden soil with perfectly natural and/or cheap stuff. Make a pile of dried-up leaves (carbon) mix with animal manure (nitrogen), add water (oxygen) and the stack heats up and makes its own hydrogen. After sitting for a while, it is called compost and you mix it with your dirt and don’t worry about burning your plants by applying too much of it. Potash with some phosphate is literally the ash from your fireplace or the bottom of your barbecue. I’ve never worried too much about the exact ratios of the elements I’ve added to the soil. I’ve thrown in compost, manure, ashes and either lime or sulfur and thought it was good enough. In heavy clay, I’ve added tons of dried leaves. But, DH is obsessed with this aspect of growing and as I learn more from him I’ll pass it on.
Adding nitrogen organically means adding manure. All manure is not alike; directly applying chicken manure will kill most plants because it is high in ammonia. Chicken manure needs to be mixed with carbon (leaves, hay, grass clippings) and allowed to sit until the ammonia has burned off. Using chicken manure in your compost pile makes great fertilizer; the ammonia breaks down the carbons and makes hydrogen quite speedily. A chicken scratching-yard with hay on the floor is a compost factory. Rake it out every week, throw in more hay and you get a steady supply of compost to nourish your vegetable beds.
Cow manure is less toxic than chicken manure and doesn’t need to age as long or be mixed with carbons before it can be applied because the carbons (grass) have already been mixed in the cow’s stomach. Horse manure it rated even better and can be directly applied to garden beds without aging to provide a rich nitrogen environment for plants like potatoes and beans that crave that element. Horses, apparently, poop out the equivalent of compost. You can still see hay in their droppings! Think about old-time farmers with horse-drawn plows – they were fertilizing their fields at the same time they were tilling them! What a concept!
Sometimes you may find a dairy farmer who will give you cow manure for free but most of them have caught onto the idea that they have a value-added by-product and sell it. “Gentlemen Farmers” with horse stables can’t be bothered with such lowly profit ventures, so we’ve made arrangements with one of these high-class guys. We’re leaving a utility trailer outside of his stable so his stable hands can fill it up instead of building a bigger pile. When it’s full in a week or so, we’ll go over and drive home with a load of premium manure.
It stopped raining long enough for us to dig and frame one bed. Only seven more to go before last frost in March.
This has already gone on too long so I’ll cover planting amounts/expected yields and schedules next week. I have to be out most of this morning and have a lot of work to do when I get back so I won’t be able to follow comments and respond as promptly as I did last week. Perhaps some of you will share your adventures with dirt…
I took a year-long landscaping program (in-between my nursing and now research career). We had a crusty old teacher – really old school – who would chastise us for calling it ‘dirt’ … He would say, “Dirt is what you find in your house if you don’t clean. This is soil. Soil is good, it is not dirt.” He was quite a stickler about it too, although I still call it dirt. 🙂
Thanks for the update. I can’t wait to see your beds, so I hope you’ll post photos. How long did it take you to complete the one frame?
was the hard part. Putting in the frame was easy. You may recall DH had significant resistance to the idea of double-digging/bastard trenching. So he approached the task with considerable resentment and did it the hardest way he could to emphasize how much trouble it was.
Normally, a person would trench the width of the bed, 4 or 5 feet. There would be a pile of sod in 1′ squares and 3″ deep. Then a pile of dirt equaling around 6 cubic feet. But Nooooo! He insisted on doing it lengthwise and cut the sod out in massive chunks 6″ deep. Some of them weighed 50 pounds!
He put all the dirt from the first trench on a long piece of black plastic on the side opposite from where the last trench would be filled. He decided that instead of going two spade depths down, he’d go all the way to the subsoil — about two feet down. And he decided to get started about two hours before sunset.
He huffed and puffed and got red in the face and did half of it before it got totally dark. It was an amazing performance.
The next day I went out and dug the remaining two looooong trenches in about two hours. The soil is very soft because it’s sandy loam and we’ve had a lot of rain. When I got to the last trench I had to chop the sod into smaller chunks in order to lift it. That consumed another hour. Then there was all that dirt on the other side of the bed. There was no way I could move the plastic and pull it around to the other side.
He came home from work 30 minutes early and came thru the door in a rush, “I’ll eat later. I’ve got to finish digging that bed before dark.” O har. The look on his face when he saw what I’d done. “You didn’t?” He marveled as I smiled smugly. Then he tried to pull the soil-laden plastic and it wouldn’t budge. So he had to shovel it and toss it over to the other side.
He’s going out of town this weekend for work and I hope it doesn’t rain so I can dig another bed or two while he’s gone. There’s no way I want him to stand in our garden and say he did all the hard work while I only planted the seeds.
The frame is borax-treated pine, 2″x12″x12′ long. We pounded it into the soft soil 2″ deep and held it in place with 2′ length of rebar pounded in on both sides at every corner. We haven’t put in the ends yet because we’re going to be adding manure and tilling it in.
…but your writing is very descriptive! It sounds like a grand adventure you are both having. I can totally understand your wanting to contribute to the trenching in order to ward off any potential snark down the road. If you do get a chance to dig new beds this w/e, I suppose you’ll do it by width then? 🙂
Even though he’s not happy with the amount of up-front worth, I think your husband will come around when the planting material thrives d/t the excellent beds. (I recall this was the experience of that book I mentionned in the last post — her hardwork really paid off.)
It sounds like you’ve done so much pre-planning … I’m really excited for you. Thanks so much for sharing it with us sjct.
Last night when I was writing this, I asked where you naturally get phosphate. I knew about fireplace ash containing potash (doh, just look at the word) and manure being high in nitrogen. Well, he launches into this long-winded lecture about no elements being in pure form in nature, how they are all combined in various ways, on and on until I dropped my head on my shoulder and pretended to fall asleep.
“Well, YOU asked,” he snaps and I snap back, “Did not! I still haven’t heard the answer to my question! I didn’t ask for a Chemistry 101 lecture! Let me ask again so maybe you’ll focus on the answer I need. If you couldn’t buy phosphate in a bag of 10-10-10 where the heck would you get it?”
“Oh, well, there are trace elements in fireplace ashes just like there are larger traces of potash. But, it’s not sufficient. You have to buy balanced fertilizers to be sure you’ve got what the plants need.”
“Really,” I sneered, “How did people manage to feed themselves for the millenia before garden centers were in business?”
And so it went. He doesn’t quite get the full import of “self-sufficient” yet. He thinks it only means having enough food for ourselves. I think it means having a garden that is replenished by owning a source of manure, i.e., chickens and spending as little as possible at the garden center. I accept that I’m not going to grind my own lime or bone meal or dig up sulfur. But that stuff is cheap compared to buying bags of organic 10-10-10. I also accept that until we get the chicken manure factory going we will be buying.
In an existing mixed bed (flowers and vegetables) I’m trying to figure the best time to fertilize in a zone 7-8 area.
We get about 8 days of frost every winter – just enough for ice on car windows…but the rest of the time it is cool and damp and about 50 during the day. Since I’ll plant in mid-March I’m thinking late January early Feb is a good time to work in the spring compost mix for fertilizer. I like to put in a couple of weeks before planting so that it doesn’t burn roots and gets some depth in the soil.
Any thoughts anyone??
In Zone 7b, we’ve always done fertilizing in early February. It’s odd: Atlanta is 7b and here we’ve moved all this way north and we’re still in the same zone because we’re close to the coast.
Thanks for the feedback…
I’ll go ahead with a thick top dressing in mid-Feb and then work it in sometime late in the month.
I’ve seen some great trellis’ for beans made from twigs and such that I’m going to design. Double benefit – decorative trellis and natural nutrients from the beans!
I love these Thursday diaries! They get me pumped up for weekends!
Oooo, Ooooo, I want to see a pic when you’re done. I love the woven wattle-style garden fences and trellises (trelli?) I’ve seen at the garden center but they are so expensive. Are you going to make them from found twigs or do you have a souce for buying the kind you can soak and bend?
I’m doing them from garden twigs from shrubs I have at home…and branches that I find when hiking in the mountains. Most are pine so they are only good for one season…but fun to do.
If anyone still has a Christmas tree – branches not yet cut off for recycling – fir branches trim and weave well….just a thought for recycling the tree.
Christmas trees are good for many things. On the radio the other day, I heard that our state department of natural resources was soliciting christmas trees to drop into one of the man-made lakes (i.e. dammed up river) as a place for fish to hide and live and breed in.
One of my favorites among the Pagan traditions is to place it outside after the holidays. Then place left over foods on it for the birds and squirrels during winter.
But then again I’m a pushover for critters of all types!
I used to do that when I would buy a real tree. But for the last 10 years or so I’ve had an artifical tree. Seems nicer to the forest plus (and this is the REAL reason) you don’t have to worry about it drying out and burning your house down.
I love the smell of a real tree but, for reasons like yours, I switched to artificial four years ago. I got a set of three trees in different sizes with long trunks. They came with lights already wired onto them. I decorated them with small ornaments and put a fairy at the top of each one. The first year I realized I didn’t even have to un-decorate them. I just tied them up in big trash bags and carted them up to the attic as is.
When we moved in here, I had the trees in the front window within a day. I hope that impressed the neighbors. har.
I’m getting ready to head out the door, and I haven’t had a chance to read your entire diary. Having said that – I couldn’t head out the door without thanking you for the above comment. It was way too funny! (And way too familiar ;^)
Thanks for another great diary, sjct – I’ll be back later to finish reading.
Good day!
You know, if these journals aren’t entertaining and amusing then they aren’t worth doing.
I’m enjoying these diaries, although they do make me feel guilty about my heated greenhouse that I haven’t been using…
And you’ve already got chickens and a log cabin, too! Now I’m going to stifle my envy and get on with my chores.
Well, if you have any good greenhouse gardening tips, maybe I could get motivated…
for growing seedlings? Is the floor dirt? How equipped is it?
Running water, raised trays around the perimeter, table in the center (but I’d like to rip that out to make it easier to move around in).
At the very least, go buy some tomato seeds and a few jiffy pots. Get ’em started now so they’ll be half-way to maturity by the time you transplant ’em after “all danger of frost has passed.” You could be the first kid on your block with vine-ripened tomatoes!
Google miniature lemon and orange trees and consider putting them in big pots in the back corners of the greenhouse so they will be away from drafts. In the shady spots put mammoth ferns in pots so you get that Victorian gaaaden room effect. Or hang them from the rafters.
Get rid of that table in the middle and put in a little round garden table and chairs so you and the boys can have picnics in green warmth on snowy days.
Make a box a foot deep and as big as one of the benches. Put it on one of the benches and fill it with dirt, er, good bedding soil. You can have salad crops all winter long and cucumbers, squashes, peppers. Because you control the soil, the water and the temperature, you could even grow grapes!
Order some mushroom buds and make a box for them under one of the benches. You have so many opportunities!
Gawd, I love greenhouses. When you first open the door, that first deep breath of all that sealed away ozone is intoxicating! Then, of course, I cough from the moldy, earthy smell…
I just want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed the first two entries of your journal. I’m not much of a gardener. But I have a perfect space for vegetables back behind my garage — the man who lived in the house before me had his vegetable garden there in fact, but his wife wasn’t a gardner so when he died she let it fill in with clover. I’m starting to feel guilty about it now. But that’s OK — I like to live with guilt, so I’ll keep reading your diaries 🙂
Just do a little thing: Around April or May or whenever your garden center offers them buy a tomato plant that’s in a pot, a tomato vine cage and a bag of manure. Plop the bag in the middle of your clover patch and let it lie there flat. Cut an X in the middle of it, pop your tomato plant out of its pot and stuff it down into the manure. Stick the cage over it, pushing it down into the bag and on down into the dirt. Then walk away. Visit your tomato plant every day or so to be sure the cage hasn’t fallen over. Pour some water on it when the manure looks dry. If you see itsey white bugs on it, spray them with soapy water.
Then, when you show off your tomatoes to your co-workers, you can say, “Gardening is soooo easy. I didn’t dig. I didn’t weed. I didn’t hardly look at the thing and look what I got!”
tell you your PH. If the flowers are blue, the soil is acidic, if the flowers are pink, alkaline. But that might take too long for you to wait.
Lucky you with black soil. I’ve got lots of clay, brownish color. I’m adding every kind of organic material. For example, I’m going to use my shredded papers in the compost pile and the mountain of grass clippings in the woods behind the shed. It’s a mountain created by the former owners.
It’s been raining here since December 17th – longing for a long sunny day.
One fall, when the hydrangeas blossoms turned brown but hung onto the bush, my father, in a fit of reality alteration, went out into the yard with his air brush on an extension cord leash and painted them a deep crimson/orange. Within days, three separate neighbors pounded on his door to ask what fertilizer recipe had created such an affect. har. I am the nurturing result of an eccentric and proud of it.
I have served my time on hard red clay and deserve this black soil, I tell you; I’ve earned it after a lifetime of dealing with brick soil!
The weather here in eastern NC is reminding me of the West Country in the UK. This morning the fog was so thick I needed a homing beacon to go out to the mailbox and come back to the front door. It has rained every other day since we arrived on 12/9. I am sure I will feel otherwise when the temperature hits 90 degrees in June. Then I will remember Georgia and how much I hate it.