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…