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Beekissed
Garden Master
My Yellow Jelly Bean tomatoes are really good ..!
@seedcorn probably wouldn't like them because they are yellow.
Steve
My Yellow Jelly Bean tomatoes are really good ..!
@seedcorn probably wouldn't like them because they are yellow.
Steve
Well I think you're wrong.Grow what you, family & friends like. Everyone has their own reasons to like what they do. No right or wrong answers.
Although black tomatoes are just wrong.......![]()
Look at what Mother Nature does. She takes dead branches and tree trunks and lays them down on the ground and has all manner and hords of molds , bugs,birds , animals and her own mix of chemicals, etc. to decompose them that takes up to decades to accomplish. She also drops an annual crop of leaves and pine needles down to also decompose. These take a year or more . She also sends rain to wash dirt dust and smoke particles off her plants quite often. All of this takes time to complete the decomposition cycle. Gurus tout the method, but not the fine print.Added a new layer of chips on the garden, especially around the plants where they were so thin. These chips were half composted, having been piled for a year, but they still seem to be leaching nitrogen from the plants all the same.
This is where I get confused about this method...if one is always adding chips as the other chips compost down, isn't one always experiencing nitrogen leaching from the newer chips? So always having to worry about nutrient balance, how much to add without it being too much, etc.
So, now I have to go and steal some compost from the coop, when I have very little left to steal, and make it into compost tea so it will go further and side dress all these plants. After three years of this method, you'd think that all this side dressing would be over and one could just count on the nutrition from the composting wood chips, wouldn't you? When does it all balance out and for how long?![]()
Bee, my plum tree and one blueberry bush are showing signs of the wood chips leaching some nitrogen. What are you feeding your plants to counter that? Everything else is fine. I'm so happy that I can go a little over a week without watering my big containers!
Mary
Hi everyone. I know it's been a while, but I've been busy with work mostly. Have't had much garden time. I did manage to get a good harvest from my tomatoes & peppers. I have several quarts of each in the freezer.
How did you harvest come out Bee? I know you were struggling with bugs this year. I ended up with very little squash. My second round of squash grew pretty good, it just didn't produce very much. I did manage to get rid of most of the squash bugs. I had to rake out the chips to accomplish that. The chips just gave them too many places to hide.
I've decided to expand my raised beds. I want to make the higher and not as wide. Having 4x8 is just a bit too wide fro me to work good. I pulled up the bed boards to convert them over and found most of them had rot and tons of termite damage. The squash bed was really bad. I even had termites in the chips.
I'm going with cement/cinder blocks. I have a bed I built with them when I made my chicken coop. It works great, so I'm going with the cinder blocks for my bed sides. I'm hoping to have everything up by spring planting time.