Depletion of the Soil?

[baymule]

try this link for hours of reading. I love this magazine. It is all about keeping the soil healthy.


http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/articles.htm

 

[so lucky]

Dodder is a parasitic plant that lives on other plants. It is resistant to herbicides, and is very hard to kill. I have heard tales of a farmer disking through it and spreading it all over his farm. The kind around here is bright orange, very fine stems and lots of joints and branches. It looks like a big mass of orange crochet thread laying on top of the host plant.

 

[journey11]

Googled it. Gotta say, I'm a bit creeped out by it. It sounds like an evil zombie plant. So glad we don't have it around here!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Journey, we had some of that in East Tennessee, a yellow viney looking thing, but it did not take over a place. I dont remember seeing any here but Im sure we have some. There are a lot of different varieties of that stuff. Not all are as bad as some others are. I'd be surprised if you didn't have some varieties around that haven't been bad enough for you to notice.

Geisha, what makes you think it is soils depleted of nutrients? That should be impossible in one year of crops. The soil gets depleted of nutrients over several years, especially when the same crop is repeatedly grown there.

For seeds to germinate, they need the right conditions, mainly moisture and the right temperature. Some need light but those are usually tiny seeds like basil, not the ones you mentioned. If you notice, the ones that did well were cool weather crops, except strawberries. The others require warm soils to germinate. If the soil is not warm enough for some of those things, instead of germinating, the seeds will rot in the ground, especially if it is a little wet. If it is dry, they can wait on the ground to warm up. Im assuming the strawberries were transplanted plants, so they will be different.

How many nutrients are present in a paper towel? Thats how I do germination tests. Keep the seeds in between a few layers of damp paper towels to see if they will sprout. They will live and grow some just on the food stored in the seed. You are there and I am not, but Id suspect your germination problems may have been temperature related more than nutrient-depletion related.

I dont know why the horse manure ones would do better. Was the timing different or maybe was that on the sunny side of a hill?

This is a real stretch, but how fresh was that horse manure? Dad used to get sweet potatoes started early outside by burying fresh chicken manure in a shallow pit, putting a layer of dirt, layer the sweet potatoes he wanted to sprout over that, then cover that with mostly composted sawdust maybe 6 to 8 deep. Hed cover that with cheesecloth too. The rotting chicken manure provided heat under the sweet potatoes to help them get started so he had sweet potato slips early enough to make. I doubt it was rotting fresh horse manure that provided the heat necessary for germination for you, but there was something different if those sprouted and the others did not.

There is another possibility. The soil could be too hot with nitrogen or maybe something else. Maybe not depletion but excess nutrients. If a crop was grown there last year, youd think a lot of the excess would have been used or would have leached away over winter, but I sure did not see what was done. I dont know. Again, this does not explain why your cool weather crops did OK and the hot weather crops did not, but maybe it explains the horse manure. You may have mixed the soil enough to reduce the concentration of nutrients to allow the crops to grow.

Another problem if crops are grown for a long time in one spot is that salts can build up. This is especially true if it is irrigated. Salt build-up can be a problem, even using fresh water. But if your soil has too much nutrients or salts, that could maybe explain why the ones that sprouted died, including the strawberries. They may have just burned up. Or did you heavily fertilize them? I know you said you were going organic and most organic fertilizers are not that hot, but sometimes Ill ask silly questions just to get you thinking.

If the weather turned ridiculously dry like it did here and you did not water, that would explain why they dried up and blew away. But that does not explain the cool weather crops and the ones in horse manure doing OK.

There are two basic kinds of herbicides, pre-emergence and post-emergence. Pre-emergence keep seeds from sprouting. Post-emergence kill the plants after they sprout. There are several different herbicides in both these categories and they are different from each other both in how they act and the residual effects. Some only affect specific types of plants, say broadleaf versus grasses. Most break down fairly quickly but some may have longer residual effects. Again this does not explain your cool weather crops or the ones in horse manure, but maybe it will get you to thinking if this might be something to consider. A post-emergence would explain why the crops died, but you had a variety of things that died after sprouting. This is not all that high on my list of possibilities, but again, you are looking at it. Im not.

Something else that can cause plants to die is disease, parasites or pests, or even moles or voles tunneling under them and disturbing the root system. I sincerely doubt moles or voles tunneled under all your plants so I would discount them as the problem. Im not aware of any single disease, parasite, or pest that would hit all those crops, let alone leave you cool weather crops and the ones in the horse manure alone.

Those strawberries are a bit of an anomaly since they were transplants and not from seeds. It being too dry, especially after you transplant them might cause that. They dont take really hot weather well either. I generally lose a lot of them during my hot dry summers, even with a lot of watering. Did you maybe plant them too deep? If you bury the crown, they dont do well at all.

Its very possible that you have different causes for what happened to different crops. I wasnt there watching and I dont really know what happened. Im just throwing out a lot of different things so maybe something will strike a note with you. Good luck figuring it out. These things are not always easy.

 

[GardenGeisha]

Thanks for the great responses, everyone.

Ridgerunner, the seeds that did germinate best, apart from those in the manure patch, were in an area that got the most water-- from the irrigation channel nearby. They were also in the area nearest the manure patch.

The horse manure was only 2 weeks old when I planted in that area. I wonder whether you might be onto something with the extra heat it may have generated? It was a very warm spring here, though, so I wouldn't have thought extra heat would even have been needed? The horse manure was deposited directly atop the soil by horses, and the ground it was deposited on was compacted hard. I didn't work it or mix the manure in. That was why I was so surprised it grew things so well. The stuff that didn't grow was planted in well worked soil. Bizarre. I have read that potatoes are one plant that works hard soil, so maybe that's why-- the potatoes did the job for me?

Later planted potatoes not in the horse manure have not done well.

Dahlia tubers that were not in the manure did horribly. It took them forever to germinate. 10 weeks! I think lack of water may have been a problem. Some of them were eaten (sprout tips) somewhat by earwigs and/or snails.

I dug up all the poorly dahlias and moved them to pots, where they quickly recovered. Just unearthed one the other day while planting potatoes. It had a sprout and green growth and had been buried for weeks and weeks. But it is a survivor and now in a pot it has sprouted new green growth.

I planted strawberries a few years ago in my raised bed near the house that gets a lot more moisture and they also turned to dust and blew away. I wish I had left these latest berries in the chicken run, where they had overwintered so nicely, but I was afraid the chickens would have destroyed them. I am sure they would have, and I knew not to plant them in that raised bed again. I suspect they are susceptible to some sort of wilt/fungus that makes their leaves go brown and dry up and blow away.

The manure patch is not on a sunny hill. It is identical to the rest of the garden-- flat. Same amount of sun. It is nearest the irrigation but it started doing well and growing nicely way before the irrigation water was turned on.

Salts are an interesting theory. That well could be. From the previous year's fertilizer the farmers would have used. But funny the salts wouldn't have gotten the plants in the manure patch, too, so maybe not. I believe hot peppers were grown last year where I have had the poor results with my plants this year. And tomatoes were grown in that area, too, last year. Volunteer tomatoes have come up and are stunted and won't grow right. I am finally getting my giant corn to look good in that area. It is supposed to produce 15" ears.

If it were bugs, I would think they would have gotten the seeds nearest the manure patch that germinated and are now looking good.

This land has been farmed in the past, but not for at least 5 years before it was farmed last year.

 

[hoodat]

Dodder is a parasitic plant that grows on other plants. It has no chlorophyl so it can't make its own food. Instead of going into the soil the roots burrow into the tissue of other plants and tap the nutrients they produce. If it gets too abundant it can kill entire stands of plants. Dodder is poisonous and usually a bright yellow or orange in color. The color is probably a warning to browsers to keep it from being eaten. It was sometimes used as an abortive by natives where it grows.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Maybe you could get an analysis on soil samples taken from a couple of different areas? Your county extension office, in the phone book under county government, can help you with that soils analysis. They ought to know the best and least expensive way to get one done. That might help tell you what you are dealing with.

I can't make sense out of a lot of what you saw. Obviously there is something going on but I can't figure it out.

Good luck!

 

[hoodat]

Plant roots can break through amazingly hard soil if the nutrients are there. If you really want to break up hard soil plant the broad leafed chicory used as wildlife fodder. Those huge roots really loosen things up and bring nutrients that have been leached deep back to the top. A word of warning though. Dry them thoroughly in the sun before burying them in the compost pile. If there is any sap at all in them they will keep putting out foliage and resist rotting for a long time. Once dried they decay easily and give up all of the nutrients they brought up into the compost readily.

 

[ducks4you]

I agree about getting a soil analysis. Sorry, I didn't read the first post thoroughly, but I've never had the crop failure you talked about, and I use both horse and chicken manure (from my animals.)
It's also been a TERRIBLE year to garden, what with ridiculous and constant desert heat and drought. Please, let us know when you figure out the fix.

 

[GardenGeisha]

Thanks for the great responses, everyone.

I had a chard plant come up just the other day. It was planted in mid-May. It came up in an area that I had started watering more heavily, so I think maybe the soil was much drier than I had thought.