The only thing I sort of disagree about is that vinegar or citric acid does make bicarbs soluble. So if you water a 2nd time very deeply maybe a few hours after the first watering, you can flush the bicarbs out of the pot. In other words remove them. At least this is my understanding of what happens when the bicarbs are neutralized they become soluble. I may be wrong, but I think that is correct. Tap water is basic because of the bicarbs. Often it is added as acid corrodes pipes, so best to move alkaline water for long life pipes. Eventually you should leach out all the lime in your pots. As long as you water deeply, some is flushed out each time. Of course how many your adding matters too! In the other thread we found some data about aquariums, and they use phosphoric acid. The articles clearly states in a closed system vinegar and citric acid are useless. We though are not in a closed system. but was proof at least as far as us on the Orchard forum were concerned that acetic or citric acid did not really remove bicarbs long term. This is more important in raised beds, or in ground, we need to remove them, as they cannot be leached out very well. I just collected some more rainwater today. I will melt snow in the winter for my potted plants. I have enough now to get me through the winter with some supplements from snow. Luckily I try to limit water in the winter. Most of my plants are dormant. Only a few actually grow in the winter. antidotal evidence but when I switched to rain water a few years ago, my plants grew like crazy, the deposits on the pots disappeared too. The difference was obvious. If I run out of rainwater, I do have sulfuric acid. In the middle of summer, I cannot collect enough and use the acid on tap water. This post was edited by Drew51 on Wed, Dec 4, 13 at 15:22

My soil is brick hard, heavy red clay with a thick Bermuda grass lawn. so I wanted to plant in raised beds rather than fighting this soil and invasive grass. I covered the existing sod with 4 layers of cardboard boxes to smother the grass, and put everything on top of that. In the thread "Reheat old pile in new composter??", I posted a comment "Cold vs Hot Compost" where I explained how I simply piled 6 feet of leaves and grass clippings inside my raised beds last fall and left them all winter. By spring I had a foot of rich leaf mold in the 3 raised beds where I planted herbs, tomatoes, and peppers. Last week I was removing a few of the determinate tomato vines that were past their prime and replacing them with some suckers I had removed earlier and rooted in pots. The roots of the old plants I was removing were anchored very well into the clay soil beneath the bed. The earthworms, soil microbes, and plant roots together have already begun to improve the tilth of the hard clay beneath the bed. There was no sign of the grass sod or cardboard boxes; the worms had eaten them all up. Last fall I had originally planned to double dig the area beneath the raised beds, until I found that I could not dig a hole more than a few inches deep. After only 9 months since I piled up the leaves, using only a hand trowel, I was now able to easily dig 6 inches into the original soil beneath the beds. It would have taken a jackhammer to have dug 6 inch last fall. This fall I'm planning to mix in more leaves to compensate for organic matter that has decayed this summer. As soon as my neighbors rake their leaves and put them by the road, I'm planning to drag them home with me to start a 4th bed for strawberries next spring. While double digging beds used to be considered the "gold standard" by which to get great results, new research is increasingly going the other way. I was reading a report on the Rodale Institute's website recently about mycorrhizal fungi and its benefits to crops. To maximize mycorrhizal colonization, their research is showing that you should plant cover crops which you mow down rather than turn under. By disturbing the soil as little as possible and keeping cover crops growing whenever fields are not in production, the soil supports development of more beneficial microbes that maintain the tilth of the soil better than plowing does. I've got a long discussion going about mycorrhizal fungi in the container forum. While soils often contain enough of the fungi so that inoculants are not needed, there has been some debate of whether plants in containers could benefit from inoculation with mycorrhizal fungi. Some said that the high temps in containers would destroy the fungi, but new research suggests the fungi survive the high temps of soil in containers during summer and are a great help to plants in containers during hot weather. Once you establish a healthy soil climate in the raised beds, recent research suggests that the microbes and plants will take over and do everything that is needed to maintain improve the soil beneath the bed as well.

I wish I had answers for you, but it can be really hard to fix a soil problem while plants are actively growing. If you have a nutritional issue, those can be fixed sometimes with plants actively grown in the ground, generally by using a water soluble fertilizer (either organic or synthetic, depending on what sort of problem is showing up). pH issues are more of a slower-fix, unless you use sulfur pre-planting during soil prep time, which I sometimes do. I would like to point out that my natural soil pH before I amend the soil is 8.2 to 8.3 and I am happy if I can even keep it at 7 to 7.5 after copious amounts of amending. The problem is worse in a year when I have to irrigate a lot because our water co-op gets is water from wells and that water tests about as high in pH as my soil. It is less of a problem when rain is watering the garden for me. With soil in that range, I still get tons and tons of tomatoes, so I am not sure how much of your tomato plant problem is related to soil pH. Would your plants and mine be happier in a soil pH of 6.8 to 7.0? Probably, but I don't think having the soil in that range is strictly required either. We have to work with what we've got. I think it more likely is related to the fact that we have had a lot of wet weather and that it only takes about 15 minutes (or less) of moisture on the leaves to start fungal diseases growing and spreading once the fungi pop up in the garden. Fungal diseases are running rampant in my garden after the plants had heavy rain, fog, dew, mist, drizzle, etc. wetting their leaves for a good 3 or 4 weeks nonstop. Even though I used a fungicide to slow down the spread of the disease, it didn't slow it down enough. Now spider mites are hitting in incredibly high numbers. They probably are not yet the worst I've ever seen, but they are the worst I've seen this early in the season. Between the spider mites and fungal issues, I would like to throw myself down on the ground, kick and scream and have a good old-fashioned temper tantrum. The change in the once-beautiful tomato plants in just a couple of weeks' time, and especially in the last week, makes me want to cry. But, my rule is that there's no crying in gardening, unless I get bitten by a scorpion or a bumble bee. So, I just try to fight the good fight once fungal issues rear their ugly heads. Honestly, once the fungi arrive in a very wet year, I start hoping and praying the next year will be a drought year so that I don't have to deal with these issues in next year's garden. Here's the best remedy for fungal infections of tomato plants. 1) Strip off all the infected foliage and dispose of it far away from the garden. Remove as much as you can while still leaving enough foliage to keep the existing fruit from sun-scalding. 2) Spray the plants with the fungicide of your choice, always following label directions. Spray on a 7 to 10 day schedule, alternating the use of at least 2 different fungicides to prevent tolerance/resistant issues from developing. I find Daconil works well overall up to a point, but is most effective if sprayed from the very first day the plants go into the garden. If you wait until disease has developed to start using fungicide, the disease doesn't go away. You don't cure it. You just try to slow down its rate of spread. I like to alternate Daconil with copper because copper is better on slowing the growth of some plant diseases, like Septoria Leaf Spot. 3) Be sure you have mulch everywhere, including in pathways adjacent to the tomato plants, to avoid having soil splash carrying disease microorganisms up onto the plants. 4) Don't handle tomato foliage while it is wet if you can avoid doing so. (When we are perpetually wet like we were for several weeks in May/early June, this rule is impossible to follow because the plants always are wet. 5) Feed the plants well to see if you can force them to put on enough new foliage quickly enough to outgrow the diseases. This can work surprisingly well some years but if spider mites are involved, it doesn't work because they move to the new, fresh leaves very quickly. 6) Be prepared to yank out the plants if they keep going downhill due to disease or persistent pest issues like spider mites. There is a degree of wisdom involved in knowing when the battle you're fighting is worth fighting versus knowing that sometimes it is better to just pull the plants out and put in fresh plants for fall. If you go the route of putting in fresh plants for fall, you can add amendments to the soil before you plant, and then be sure to spray the new plants preventively with a protectant fungicide from Day 1. 7) Sometimes you can prevent some foliar diseases by spraying your plants weekly with compost tea (NOT manure tea) or Garrett Juice. I had a lot of luck with that for several years, but I hate spraying this stuff on plant foliage that is prone to get diseases when wet! It just seems wrong. I haven't used compost tea or Garrett Juice the last few years, but might go back to using them (from day one of planting out) next year to see if they help, or if I was just lucky in the years I did this. 8) Sometimes you can avoid some disease problems by planting varieties developed to have tolerance of/resistance to some of the more common foliar diseases. However, even the handful of varieties that supposedly have Early Blight resistance seem to get it just as bad in my garden as other varieties that have no known resistance, so I am not sure if this really helps if the problem is either Early Blight or Septoria Leaf Spot. It might help if Alternaria canker is a persistent problem in your garden. 9) For better health on the next go round, try using Actinovate or something similar at planting time. To some extent, I have learned that in wet years, the fungal diseases are just going to show up no matter what I do, so I try not to overreact when it happens. I have noticed it always shows up at the same time the plants are carrying a very heavy load of fruit and feel like, to some degree, the diseases exploit the fact that the tomato plants' focus at that time is on enlarging and ripening fruit, not on fighting diseases. This acceptance means that you are willing to tolerate ugly tomato plans for a few more weeks in order to harvest the fruit already on them, but it also means that you know at some point you will just need to remove those horrible-looking plants and put in new fresh ones. I usually do that at the end of June. Right now, my plants have tons of fruit and if they never set another fruit, I'll be happy with what is already on the plants. I just hope to keep the plants alive long enough for that fruit to mature. When I remove diseased plants, I don't do it wholesale. I remove the worst-looking ones first as soon as their main harvest period is over, and I leave the best-looking ones. Often, once I remove the worst-looking ones, I can baby along the best-looking ones and sometimes, around mid-July, I notice they are putting out more new foliage and looking better, like they have turned a corner in the disease battle and will recover. That happened last year (when we had 78+" of rain, much or which fell in May, June and earliest July), and those plants set fruit all summer and well into fall. I am sure you know that it is helpful to grow your tomatoes in a new spot each year where tomatoes weren't grown the year before, but this is not necessarily a practical solution for a home gardener who only had so much space available in the first place. The best thing you can do is amend the soil with lots of compost annually to help the plants be as healthy as possible when diseases do pop up. Finally, I'd get a real soil test done at OSU before next year rolls around to ensure there is not some sort of nutritional issue, and I'd amend my soil as they recommend. That way you aren't trying to second-guess what is wrong or to add this or add that without knowing for sure that it is needed. Those little soil test kits can give incorrect results. Some brands of them are more accurate than other brands, but I would't trust my garden to one when a real soil test is not very expensive through a lab like OSU's soil lab. There are no magic solutions when it comes to dealing with tomato foliage diseases. They are rampant, they are worldwide, the fungal ones spread spores through the air, and everyone will have them eventually, though often a new gardener might not have them the first few years because the diseases just haven't found them yet. I've long wondered if it would be worthwhile to put up a big hoop house with only a roof and no side walls. Open side walls would allow good air flow, and a roof would keep a lot of the moisture off the plants. It is worth pondering, and might be worth doing. I'm sorry I don't have any short answers or quick fixes on this issue. It is a problem that plagues my garden just as much as it plagues anyone else's garden, and likely it is worse for me than for some folks, because between the spring crops and the fall crops, I literally grow tomatoes in almost 100% of my garden every year, so I couldn't rotate if I wanted to, at least not while I continue to grow 100 plants or more per season. For what it is worth, I am seeing Early Blight on some of the native solanum plants in the pastures, so it is everywhere...not just in your garden or mine. When all else fails, hope for drought. In a drought year, as long as I water with drip irrigation or soaker hoses, my plants stay relatively disease-free. Moisture on the ground is good, moisture falling from the air and landing on tomato foliage is bad. Good luck, Dawn

I will also add my 2 cents to the discussion that your pH need no adjusting. The vast majority of plants prefer a soil that is on the acidic side of the scale and yours is just about right where it needs to be!! In addition to most plants preferring an acidic soil, most plants will tolerate quite a wide range of soil pH as well. Despite what your cooperative extension agent says (and as a professional horticulturist, I question the validity of that advice), raising it a few tenths of a point is not going to make any significant difference in what you can grow or how well it will grow. It is pretty much a waste of time. FWIW, soils in the PNW tend to have a very similar range of pH as yours and there is seldom ever a need to lime. Maybe the lawn now and again if on the lower range of the listing. In fact, in many cases, folks want to make their soil even more acidic to best accommodate ericaceous plants, like blueberries, heaths and heathers and rhododendrons. I would also like to reinforce Babs' statement that bark mulches, wood chips or pine straw do not contribute in any significant way to making a soil acidic or an acidic soil more acidic. You would need dumpster loads full to have any kind of measurable effect.