Have you had a soil test done? Are the sweet peppers growing in the same type of soil as the hot peppers? That's always something to consider because peppers are heavy feeders.

Sweet peppers are more finicky about several things than hot peppers are, at least in our climate. I've learned to treat them differently from one another.

With peppers, I generally put the plants in the ground in very late April through mid-May. Sometimes if the weather is fairly stable, I'll put a few pepper plants in the ground as early as mid-April. If the pepper plants are exposed to soil temps and air temps that are lower than what they like early in their life, the plants can remain stunted and non-productive for months. I kinda think maybe that is what you're seeing.

When we first moved here from Texas, where we lived and gardened in zone 8, I planted my pepper plants at the same time I planted my tomato plants. That always worked fine when we lived in zone 8, and in fact, it was necessary. We always were in a race to get good fruit set on both the pepper and tomato plants before the weather got hot enough in May or early June to impede fruit set, and the weather there was not as erratic as the weather here. Once it warmed up enough to put tomato and pepper plants in the ground it tended to stay warm. Here, the weather will get surprisingly cool at night much later in the spring than it did there.

Here in zone 7, I quickly learned that if I put the pepper plants in the ground at the same time that I put the tomato plants in the ground, they'd just sit and sulk and look cold and unhappy even though the tomato plants were growing like weeds. The hot peppers would snap out of the sulking stage as soon as the weather warmed up, but the sweet peppers would sulk for another month or even longer. So, I did some research and figured out that the problem was that we have recurring cold nights here much later in the year than we did in zone 8 and that I needed to keep the pepper plants inside and warm until the nighttime lows were staying in the 50s and above. I began putting my pepper plants in the ground later and later and later. At the same time, ever since about 2007, our weather in my specific location has changed in the sense that our cold nights now hang on until early May, even though our average last frost date is March 28th. So, with a late freeze/frost hitting us around May 3 or 4 ever since 2007 (except for 2012 when our last freezing temp was recorded around March 8th or 9th), and even with me putting the plants in the ground progressively later, they still have to deal with 1 or 2 nights per week through early May where they are at risk of freezing. I cover them up with a frost blanket and that seems to have worked pretty well.

I choose my planting dates based on what the soil temperatures and air temperatures are like, and not on calendar dates. The plants could care less what the date on a calendar says and they all have a specific range of temperatures they need in order to grow well. My daytime temperatures usually are in the range both tomatoes and peppers need or at least will tolerate sometime in March, but the nighttime air temperatures and soil temperatures can lag behind. Even when the soil temperatures warm up enough, the recurring late cold nights once or twice a week remain an issue. I still try to put the pepper plants in the ground as early as I can, but not until the soil and air temps are staying warm more consistently. When a cool night is forecast to bring temperatures below 50 degrees, the peppers get covered up even if nothing else does.

How has it worked out? I used to plant both hot and sweet peppers in March with my tomato plants. I'd start getting the first mature (but green) peppers around mid-June to late June. Hot peppers would produce slightly ahead of sweet peppers, but even the sweet peppers would be producing mature, green fill-sized fruit by early July and fully-colored-up red, orange or yellow bells by late July. After I began putting the pepper plants in the ground later, I started harvesting peppers earlier. That sounds illogical, but it occurred because the pepper plants weren't set back by being exposed to colder soil and air temperatures early in their lives. This year I had sweet bells ready to harvest and use while canning salsa early in June.

Some years the weather is warm enough that I plant the peppers 2 weeks after the tomato plants. Some years I plant them 4 weeks, or even 5 weeks after the tomato plants. I get a harvest earlier doing it that way than I did when I planted them in the ground all on the same day. If a pepper plant was too cold early in its life, it is like it never really gets over that, and the sweet peppers seem more affected by it than the hot peppers.

You're always going to see differences in how most hot peppers perform versus how most sweet peppers perform in our climate. That's because hot temperatures impede pollination in most sweet peppers the same way that they impede fruit set in tomatoes. Hot peppers don't seem to be affected in the same way. You find yourself walking a fine line between planting the sweet peppers early enough that you will have ripe sweet peppers in summer instead of fall but not so early that they get too cold early in their lives and remain stunted and non-productive.

I almost always get my first harvest from the sweet peppers around mid-June, at the same time I'm getting jalapenos and tomatoes and onions in pretty good numbers. I make and can vast quantities of salsa every year (between 150-200 jars) and the peppers, both hot and sweet, have got to be mature and ready to use at the same time the other ingredients are, or I cannot get the canning done. Those first sweet peppers are harvested and used green in June. By mid- to late-July I am harvesting the sweet peppers both in the green stage and in their mature colors, whether it be orange, yellow or red. By August, I'm so busy canning hot peppers that I never seem to get around to harvesting the sweet peppers until they are fully colored up, but that is just perfect timing because I start getting ripe orange habanero peppers around mid- to late-July and I need the fully colored-up sweet bells to use when making Habanero Gold Jelly.

Now, poblano peppers are a whole different issue. They are the most finicky and persnickety pepper I've ever grown. Everything has got to be exactly how they want it when they want it and they won't produce until everything is "just so". They have driven me up the wall with their inconsistent behavior for 20 or 30 years. I tried everything under the sun with them and just never got good production from them until 2 or 3 years ago. I wish I could tell you what changed 2 or 3 years ago and why they now produce just fine for me when in the past they might or might not. I used to consider it a great poblano year if I got 4 or 6 or 8 red ripe poblanos before frost arrived. They really weren't worth growing, but we like poblanos so I kept growing them anyway even if they weren't producing much. A couple of years ago they produced a couple dozen fruit per plant. Then, either last year or the year before, they went crazy and produced hundreds of fruit. I had the plants in tomato cages and they got about 5' tall and 4-5' wide and totally took over every available inch of space they could, reaching far and wide and burying jalapeno plants beneath their heavily-laden limbs. From late summer through late autumn I was picking them almost daily, and I was waiting until they reached the red stage and still had a hard time even managing to pick all of them in a timely manner. This year they have been nicely productive, but are producing dozens of fruit per plant, not hundreds. I only have 2 poblano plants this year and they are in a different raised bed than where I grew them last year. I don't know what happened. I don't know if the soil finally arrived at just the right content of organic matter and nutrients or what. I didn't change poblano varieties. I didn't start fertilizing them. I didn't change anything, but their performance drastically improved. Gardening is like that sometimes. Whatever it was that changed, suddenly the poblanos produce like there's no tomorrow. I hope they keep it up, and I hope you are able to tweak your planting times and growing conditions and get the peppers to produce more fruit per plant.

Dawn

My poblanos are about 3-4' tall and maybe 18" wide. I have two plants and have gotten very very few peppers off these two. My neighbors? Well, there's are drought stricken and shriveled up and about dead because they (the people) are both in physically bad shape and do not get around well. I will pick there garden for them sometimes. And they have more poblanos on sick plants then you have ever seen. Same soil as mine, except mine is amended and there soil is wore out. That may go along with what you have seen. It took many many years for yours to start producing well. So maybe over the years you were using nutrients, not replacing them, and finally the poblanos started liking it. Who knows? Such is the Okie garden.

I have not learned to control Root Knot Nematodes. I cant believe that with all the organic matter I use that I still had a bad infestation of RKN, and this was in my south garden where I have never had RKN before. Every Heavy Hitter okra plant that was pulled had tons of RKN in the roots.

I wonder if there is another nematode that will control root knot nematode.

Scott, I totally understand why your neighbor's plants were producing. Plants that reproduce by seed have a biological imperative to flower, form fruit and set seed in order to ensure their species survives after they are gone. When a plant has cushy growing conditions, it may not get in a hurry to do the flowering, fruiting and seed creation/dispersal process because it doesn't feel like it it threatened. When a plant is struggling to survive, it often will begin to flower, fruit and set seed in an effort to ensure it has done its part to perpetuate its species before it dies. Often, if a friend tells me that their ______plant (tomato, pepper, okra, whatever....) is green and lush but won't flower, first we have the discussion about the evils of excess nitrogen and then we discuss whether they are being too good to their plants and need to maybe water and fertilize less so the plants will feel like their life may be winding down and that they need to hurry up and create/disperse some seed.

I have excellent soil that has been well-amended in some places and not as well-amended in other places (deliberately because some plants do better in soil that's not as rich) and it didn't matter where I put the poblanos. Compared to every other type of pepper in the garden, they were poor producers, and that included producing poorly even when other pepper plants sitting 2' away from them had so many peppers on them that the branches were breaking. I think that the poblano likely are just more temperature-sensitive and humidity-sensitive than most other peppers, and just because I've had good crops from them the last 2 or 3 years, that doesn't mean that I think every year will be that way. I cannot do much about the temperatures or humidity levels, so I think the poblano peppers may always just have good years sometimes and bad years other times. They are pretty late to flower and set fruit compared to all the other peppers I grow, and I just think that most of the time, they probably do not start to flower until we already have high heat, high humidity or both at the level that impedes fruit set.....so the flowers abort without ever forming a pepper. I'm pretty far south in OK so sometimes we get temperatures high enough to negatively affect pepper and tomato pollenation/fertilization even in May. Other years we might not have the high heat, but we have really high humidity. What works best for me is to ignore the darn poblano peppers totally and completely until I see peppers turning red on the plants.....that's when I start paying attention. You know, a watched pot never boils. : )

Larry, I know how those darn nematodes spread. There's several ways.

They spread in the soil. For example, if you are using any sort of tool---a little hand-held trowel, a larger shovel or spade or garden rake, a rototiller, a tractor with a plowing attachment or whatever, those must be washed clean before they move from a nematode-infested area to an area that is so-far free and clear of nematodes because the nematodes can be transmitted via soil or mud clinging to tools. The RKNs even can travel on muddy or dirty boots or shoes, the tires of a vehicle, etc.

They can spread in the water via either heavy rainfall that flows from a nematode-infested area to a nematode-free area, or via irrigation water that travels the same way. Some people work their way around nematodes by growing in containers that are set up on top of concrete blocks so there is no way nematodes can travel up through the container's drainage holes when the garden area is flooded by rain runoff.

They can be spread from vegetable or flower transplants that have a nematode-infested growing medium.

They often thrive in weedy areas, so it is very important to avoid letting weeds infiltrate your garden for any length of time at all.

Even if you regularly grow Elbon rye or canola to trap them, some will survive and reproduce.

Growing vegetable varieties that have some tolerance of nematodes can help. Often these are referred to as nematode-resistant, but the truth is that even these varieties can eventually succumb to southern root knot nematodes, particularly once the real summer heat sets in. For legal reasons, since the patent holders who bred those plants cannot guarantee they are resistant to all nematodes for their entire life, they really should refer to them as being nematode tolerant, not nematode resistant.

A 3 or 4 year crop rotation can help, following nematode-susceptible crops with other crops that nematodes don't like or cannot tolerate can help.

Solarizing the soil for 8 to 12 weeks in the heat of the summer (preferably June through August) by covering it with heavy plastic weighted down to hold it in place can help. I don't care much for solarization myself because if it will kill nematodes, it also will kill some, if not all, of the beneficial microorganisms that live in the soil. For this reason, I just wouldn't use solarization except as a very drastic last resort.

One of the best ways to beat the nematodes is merely to plant nematode-susceptible crops as early as you possibly can without losing them to cold weather, because the bigger and more healthy the plants are before the soil temperature gets warm enough (64 degrees, I think) for the nematodes to become active and actively reproducing, the higher the chance you'll get some sort of harvest before the RKNs can destroy the plants' roots.

We have a lot of sugar sand in our area (and I'm so grateful we didn't buy a place with sugar sand) and I know folks here who just finally threw in the towel and gave up gardening because the nematodes just ruined their gardens every year. The sandy soil we have here at our house is a brown loamy sort of stuff. I used to know its name, but I no longer remember it, and it does not resemble the sugar sand where our friends have had so much trouble with nematodes.

Also, be sure you aren't using cold-compost (that decomposed slowly over a longer period of time without the pile heating up enough to kill the nematodes and potentially dangerous pathogens) because that sort of compost can carry the nematodes to new areas where they weren't found before.

If I had a serious nematode issue here, I don't know what I'd do. I might just garden in Earthboxes or other similar self-watering containers rather than deal with the nematodes year in and year out.

When I was a kid (you know, back in the old days when we had to walk 8 miles to school in the snow and it was uphill both ways), you could treat your soil with a fumigant type product that was supposed to kill the nematodes. I don't remember what the fumigants were called in the 1960s and 1970s, but I remember that at least some of them had to be injected into clean (plowed and raked level) soil at a particular depth. Then you covered the area with heavy plastic for a certain period of time. The fumigants spread in various ways, but the ones I remember spread as a gas. They did kill the nematodes (and likely all the other biological life in the soil too) but I think it came with a high price tag attached in terms of those products maybe not being really safe to use around humans. I think they still use products like methyl bromide as a fumigant in some commercial fields, but I do not know of any type of fumigant available to home gardeners or recommended for use by home gardeners because of the safety issues. My dad used a lot of sand (the type that looked like beach sand) to try to fix his black clay soil and he brought in nematodes that way more than once, so even though we had black clay, there was a period where we had too much of that sand in some places and that sand had nematodes. He switched to growing all his tomatoes in whiskey barrels the last 20 or 25 years of his life and never had nematode issues again. His tomatoes grew at the uphill portion of the yard and the garden was further downhill, so water didn't flow from his garden towards the whiskey barrels. That was his ultimate solution.

Scott, Some retailers sell beneficial nematodes they say will control root knot nematodes, but I've rarely seen them recommended by the state universities/state extension systems that deal with agriculture and horticulture within their particular state, and I believe that is because they have not seen benefits from those beneficial nematodes in field trials they conducted.

Dawn

Dawn, back in the 70's or 80's I used a product by the name of Vapam for nematode treatment in my flower beds. I have used winter till and compost for treatment in the vegetable garden. Winter till is my favorite method of attacking RKN. I think that Winter till is my favorite method for dealing with nematodes because I love working the soil better than any other gardening activity.

Larry, Oh wow, I do remember Vapam and I remember when they took it off the market for home gardeners. That must have been in the early 1990s, and they made it a restricted use product. I remember gardening friends of my father's in Fort Worth who were upset to lose the ability to purchase and use Vapam in their home gardens.

Another name from way back then? Kelthane for spider mites. It's been on and off the market for use by home gardeners for so long that I haven't kept up with it and don't know if it currently is on or off., but I remember my dad used it at some point and I didn't think it helped. (He might have waited until it was too late.) I think Vapam still is used in commercial agriculture.

With all the rain you get, I'm surprised your soil is dry enough to work in winter, but I'm glad that it is.

Dawn

Dawn, I try to work my soil when it is frozen, if it is not frozen too deeply my tiller will still burst it up and the uv rays and dry wind seem to help

I haven't learned the length of time it takes for straw to break down in a compost bin.

Back in June we made our first compost bin. It's made out of a wire that is similar to chicken wire only stronger and is supported by 4 metal stakes. It's about 4 foot tall. I layered kitchen scraps with straw. Once it was full, I started a new bin. The first bin's contents are shrinking. I turn and water it about once a week. It has steamed. The food scraps have disappeared and there are some clumps of blackish stuff mixed in with the straw now. But the straw isn't breaking down at all. How long does that take?

Hazel, There's many variables involved, including how old/fresh the straw was, the size of the pieces of straw, the ratio of kitchen scraps to straw, etc. Also, we are discussing straw, right? Not hay?

To get straw to break down quickly, it helps if you chop it up or shred it up into small pieces before you put it on the compost pile. Small pieces decompose much more quickly than large ones. When I have material I want to put onto the compost pile in the fall, I run over it with the lawnmower (with the grasscatcher attached) to cut it up into small pieces and then empty the grasscatcher bag or bin (push mower has a bag, riding mower has three garbage-can-sized bins) onto the compost pile. The pieces are usually anywhere from 1/4" long to 2" long depending on what the material was before I started cutting it up. At that size, when chopped browns are mixed with greens and kept moist but not sopping wet, I can have finished compost in March from piles built in November using spent garden plants, lawn clippings from the winter rye grass, and chopped/shredded autumn leaves.

If I leave straw intact in the size it was when we got it, it can take it up to a year to decompose, although there are variables that influence the speed at which it decomposes---including the ratio of straw to other organic materials thrown onto the compost pile.

A compost pile will have some materials, like straw and autumn leaves for example, that are high in carbon and will have other materials, like fresh grass clippings and spent plants from the garden, that are higher in nitrogen. You need to have both in your compost pile in order to get fairly rapid decomposition. For composting purposes, items high in carbon are referred to as browns and items high in nitrogen are referred to as greens. (This is an oversimplification because the greens have carbon in them too, but it works for our purposes.) For the fastest decomposition, you need to have good mix of browns and greens. Too many browns and the pile will not decompose and too many greens and it can decompose too rapidly and turn into a slimy mess.

I get good decomposition when my piles have roughly half browns and half greens by volume at the time they are added to the pile. In the fall when I make autumn leaf compost piles, I try to use about 60% chopped/shredded autumn leaves, by volume, and 40% greens. Often, that late in the season, my greens come in the form of grass clippings from winter rye grass. We like to overseed our bermuda grass lawn with rye grass seed in the fall so we have a sea of green around our house in winter. I need to have green plants in winter or I go stir crazy, and even green grass counts at that time of the year. When I build compost piles composed of chopped/shredded autumn leaves and winter rye grass lawn clippings, I can have finished compost, and lots of it, in March from a pile built in November, and sometimes (generally in warmer, sunnier winters) even in February. I don't turn piles at all in the summer because of our snake problems. In the winter I don't turn them often--maybe once or twice if at all, and I only water them in winter or summer if a wildfire is approaching and I'm trying to get the compost pile very wet so it won't burn if the flames reach it.

My summer compost piles lean heavily towards more greens simply because most of what I throw on the piles in summer are either kitchen scraps (and the wildlife here scavenge the pile at night and eat most of them) or fresh weeds that I just yanked out of the ground or spent green plants from the garden, which contain both nitrogen and carbon. They decompose more slowly but do better in fall after I add more autumn leaves to increase the carbon level.

I do keep some bales of hay sitting around and they are largely decomposed in the center, so sometimes I break one of them apart in the summer and toss it onto the compost pile. It always is steaming hot and composty in the middle of the bale (these bales are from the final cutting of 2010) with the only still-intact hay on the outside perimeter of the bale. Adding those browns to the pile in summer keep it cooking along at a good pace.

Straw is only the stalks of grain plants---the part of the plant left over after the grain and chaff has been removed, so it is rich in carbon and is considered a brown. To get that straw to decompose as fast as your kitchen scraps are decomposing, you'd have to have cut the straw into small pieces and also be sure that you have enough greens to get the straw to cook along and break down. I suspect that you need more greens on the pile, but that is just a guess. Still, the straw eventually will break down.

Hay breaks down a little differently, although it depends on what kind of hay you have. My hay is native pasture hay that is composed of mixed native grasses of many kinds and native forbs, so it already is a mix of browns and greens at the time it is cut and baled. If I leave it in the bales, it will decompose from the inside out. It takes a couple of years to get it good and hot in the middle in a dry year, and considerably less time in a really rainy year. I mostly use it as mulch, where it decomposes in place in my raised beds and pathways. The bales I have left right now are 95% compost and pretty much disintegrate when I touch them, so I'll be scooping them up into the wheelbarrow and adding them, as compost, to beds this fall after I remove the spent plants. Because there is so much herbicide carryover in hay and straw nowadays, these may be the last bales of hay I'll ever use---other than purchased alfalfa (which is a legume so it cannot be sprayed with the herbicides that are causing problems in gardens via herbicide carryover). After spending 16+ years enriching our soil through the addition of copious amounts of organic matter, I bring in almost nothing from outside our property any more because I worry about bringing in materials that have herbicide carryover. When you import materials to use in the garden, whether it is hay, straw, purchased compost, municipal compost, etc., you have no control over whether those materials are contaminated with herbicide, so the threat of carryover exists. Because we have acreage, there's no shortage of material to put on the compost pile---I just have to be willing to do the work to cut it, gather it and put it on the piles. With organic matter gathered here on our property, I know there will not be any herbicide carryover because we don't use those kinds of herbicides.

Hope this helps you understand a little bit more about the composting process.

Dawn

Thanks for the great info, Dawn.
I used straw. It is new clean straw. When I started the compost bin, I didn't have any "brown" material. It was June--no leaves. I may have used too much brown and not enough green, but I read somewhere that a compost bin needs more brown than green. I usually save all my kitchen scraps in a large container and dump it in the bin once a week and then add straw on top of it. I don't see many bugs in my compost bins...and it actually smells nice (to me) when I turn it over. It does get dry and doesn't have that "spongy" texture that all the websites say you should have. I could add more kitchen waste to it. Or some donkey and horse poop from the field next door. Now, after reading your comments about manure on another thread, I'll a little afraid of that. The owners certainly do not spray their field and haven't even fed the donkey and horse hay since I've lived here (April). They are somewhat neglected animals. However, we've purchased feed for them and dump it over the fence and a couple of other neighbors have tossed hay over the fence for them. Is there organic horse feed? Organic hay?
Organic chicken feed? We will get chickens in the spring. How sad not to be able to use manure.

About weeds. We use a push mower in the backyard/dog yard and it has a bag. I have read that weeds shouldn't go on a compost pile or grass that has gone to seed. I'm really confused about all of this. (I'm so new to it). Our property is full of weeds and I've been afraid to dump the mower bag into the compost bin. Is it actually okay to do this? What about tree trimmings from unsprayed trees?
What about plants destroyed by squash vine borers and other bugs?

Everyone who writes about how to make compost emphasizes the need for more browns than greens, and I've always just ignored that for the most part. The plain, basic truth is that whatever organic material you pile up on the ground eventually will decompose, so I just don't worry or fret about whether I had added enough browns or greens or whatever in any given week or month. Over time, it will average out and, even if it doesn't, I'm going to get compost anyway.

With the thousand-and-one things that a gardener has to worry about in a year, the ratio of greens to browns just doesn't rank high on my list. One reason is that I watched my grandfather do sheet composting in the 1960s/70s and he mostly had greens so that is what he used. They decomposed just fine. My dad had a compost bin in the corner of our backyard in the 1970s/80s and it was pretty much the same way. He mostly had browns only in fall when leaves were falling or when he had cornstalks to add to his pile. The rest of the year he mostly had greens. He got compost too. I suppose it depends on how quickly a person wants compost, but mostly to me, it is a matter of doing what is the most easy and most simple. I stay really busy in the gardening season maintaining a garden that is far too large for a small family and then putting up the excess harvest via canning, freezing, dehydrating and an occasional batch of fermentation. I simply don't have time to worry about what percentage of browns went on the pile and what percentage of greens went on the pile. Heck, I'm just excited when something makes it out of the garden and onto the pile in summer. (More about that in a minute.) It is a moot point as far as I'm concerned because I will eventually get compost regardless.

Throughout the growing season I generally (but not always) throw "stuff" on whichever of my five piles is closest to where I am working at the moment. Both of my big garden plots have smallish compost piles inside of them, but my biggest pile sits across the driveway from my big garden. That pile generally runs about 30-40' long, about 8' wide, and the height varies wildly from a foot or so tall in late winter when I am about to remove finished compost from it, to 6-8' tall in autumn when I am cleaning out the garden plots and piling spent plants on the pile. From that pile, I removed about 30 large wheelbarrow loads of compost in the late winter through early spring of 2014, adding several inches to most of my raised beds. Guess what? I got all of that from just throwing stuff on top of the pile, only watering it if a wildfire was approaching (so my compost pile wouldn't burn up if the fire got there), and never turning it. I never even once asked myself if I had enough browns or enough greens. So, clearly I am a very laid-back, casual compost maker who just ignores the rules and gets lots of compost anyhow. My method is not for everyone. If my Type A husband was a gardener, my "throw it on the pile and go work elsewhere" approach would make him crazy. He'd be out there carefully layering browns and greens in the right proportions so he could be in total control of everything that was happening. Luckily for me, he is not a gardener, so I can be a lazy compost maker without driving him up the wall.

My advice is to just not worry and fret about browns and greens too much---it all evens out over time. That doesn't mean that I completely ignore the fact that a compost pile makes compost faster if it has both browns and greens---it just means that I accept that a more laid-back approach with less worrying about the browns/greens still gives me compost.

Organic animal feeds exist, but are not necessarily easy to find and even if you find them, they are significantly more expensive.

I do use the manure. I use it on a compost pile that is filling in an eroded gully that needed to be filled in. I just don't use it in the garden areas. I could use it in the garden merely by testing it, but I don't have to take that step because I make plenty of compost on the piles that don't get the manure. I'll link an article that tells you how to do the bioassay to determine if your compost is free and clear of herbicide residues or, at least, if they are at such a low level that they don't kill your plants.

Clearly I am a rule breaker. Weeds go on and in all my compost piles despite all the garden writers who insist that a person shouldn't put them there. There is a very clear reason for that. Many of the plants we consider weeds are dynamic accumulators that accumulate certain minerals in them that may be lacking in your soil overall. Often they do this by sending roots down very deeply to reach those minerals far beneath the surface of the soil. It is one way that nature uses to pull those nutrients up to the upper layer of the ground (inside the weeds that accumulate them) so they can be recycled into the top soil for use. If I wasn't pulling those weeds and composting them, the accumulated minerals would just be released into the soil when the weed died and decomposed.

It is smarter to only put weeds on the compost pile if they haven't gone to seed, but as long as your pile gets hot enough long enough, the heat will decompose most of the weed seeds. I mulch my garden heavily after the plants are up and growing, so I really don't get all that many weeds from compost anyhow. So, obviously I just go ahead and toss weeds on the compost pile even if they have gone to seed. In fact, when I am in the garden weeding and I pull weeds, I usually lay them down right on top of the mulch that covers all my raised beds and my garden paths. In our heat and sunlight, they are going to turn brown and dead in a day or so and they will decompose right there in place, feeding the plants and enriching the soil as they break down. To me, this is the easiest way to compost. Pull the weed, lay it on top of the ground, let it break down. That's 100 times more efficient than pulling the weed, putting it in a bucket, eventually filling a bucket, carrying it to the compost pile, dumping it on the pile, letting it decompose for a few months and then coming back to the pile, filling up buckets with compost, and carrying the compost to the garden to put it right back in the general area from which the weeds originally were removed. I just cut out a lot of that lugging of buckets of stuff out of the garden and to the pile and then back again. So, do you think I'm insane? I am doing what works for me in my garden, my soil, my weather and climate and my growing and composting conditions. When I do my main cleaning up of the garden in fall, all the spent plants do get hauled out to the big compost pile, but in the growing season, the weeds become instant mulch once they are pulled.

My favorite way to make compost doesn't even involve a compost pile. It involves mulch. In the springtime, as I plant, I put about a 1/2-1" layer of finished compost on top of the beds once transplants have been planted or once seeds have sprouted and are growing. Then I add mulch, which early is the season normally is leaves I gathered in the fall by running over them with the lawnmower and chopping them up. As the season goes on and the weather warms and we are mowing the yard (2-3 acres but not all of it gets mowed every week because we wait for the seasonal wildflowers in the pasture to set seed before we mow them), I add layers of grass clippings to the top layer of mulch. I start out with 1/2-1" of mulch on beds with small plants in them, and keep adding more layers of mulch as the plants grow. My goal is to have 3-4" of mulch on top of all the growing beds before the real summer heat arrives. Of course, heat decomposes my mulch, and surprisingly fast some years, so every week when we mow, I add mulch to the beds. Now, here's where it gets fun. After all the plants are out of the beds in the fall, I can sit there with my trowel and work that compost into the garden bed. Or, I can just keep layering on more and more mulch and let it overwinter on top of the ground. (With this approach, the beds are very well mulched so that they don't sprout winter weeds. Some years I do this.) In the years where I work the mulch into the soil in the fall, I generally then sow a cold-hardy cover crop which will prevent erosion and which will fill up the space so there's nowhere for winter weeds to sprout. My pathways are mulched in the same manner. By late fall or early winter, all the pathway mulch has decomposed and is a lovely, rich, humusy compost. I can use my compost scoop to scoop up the compost from the paths and pour it onto the adjacent raised beds. Isn't that really efficient? I find it much more enjoyable to kneel on my kneeling pad with a compost scoop in my hand moving compost a couple of feet from the pathways to the beds than to haul big loads of compost one wheelbarrow load at a time from a more distant compost pile to the garden. To me, it is all about finding the most efficient way that works for a specific person in their garden with their conditions and their set-up. This is what works for me.

Tree trimmings from trees are fine to use as long as the trees haven't been treated with anything that you wouldn't want to put into a compost pile or garden. Be sure you don't take any part of a tree that was treated with a stumpkiller because some of the stumpkiller herbicides contain picloram or other similar herbicides that can persist after composting.

Plants destroyed by SVBs shouldn't be composted unless you've already gone through the stems and removed the grubs. This is because they may crawl into the soil beneath the compost pile and overwinter there. The last thing you want is for them to overwinter in or beneath your pile where they then can emerge and destroy your plants the following year. With most pests, though, I don't give it a second thought. It is not as if the pests in my garden do not exist everywhere else outside the garden. There are just as many pests in the fields, the forest, the pastures, the yard, the flower beds, etc. A hot compost pile will kill pretty much any pests in plants put onto the pile anyhow, and I can assure you that a fresh bunch of new pests will show up in and around your garden every year no matter what you do. Your garden is an ecosystem and every single thing in it either eats something or is eaten by something. You'll never have a pest-free garden. It simply isn't realistic. Many insects perform beneficial functions in a garden, and I'd say that maybe 1-3% of the insects I see in my garden cause all the trouble. The remaining 97-99% are beneficial. So, as you might guess, there's not many insects that I get very wound up about. My worst pests are grasshoppers, which are simply horrendous some years but then not a big problem at all most years. Their population cycles up and down naturally, and when we are at an "up" point in the cycle, it helps to remind myself that the up years are always followed by down years.

Don't overthink composting and don't worry too much about what you do or don't put on your compost pile. In the plainest, simplest terms, anything and everything that was once living matter will indeed decompose, and it will decompose with no help from us. It just might decompose more slowly without human intervention, but it will decompose.

Lots of people go to extreme lengths to create compost piles that are "just so" and that is fine if it is what they want to do. I just don't find myself wanting to put huge amounts of effort into creating a perfect compost pile when I know imperfect ones decompose just as well. : )

When we moved here, we bought a piece of land that was a little over 14 acres. About 3 or 4 acres were open grassland and about 10 - 11 acres were woodland. Guess where the best soil was?

Our grassland was mostly red, dense, heavily-compacted clay. I mean flower pot clay. If I ever give up gardening, I could dig red clay from our land and make flower pots all day long. It is that dense and that bad. When we first moved here, there was no drainage and puddles could stand for weeks and weeks after a thunderstorm. However bad the soil was, there are prairie grasses and forbs (and even a few cacti) that are adapted to grow in this kind of soil and they grew in it just fine. However, in order to grow the edible plants and ornamental plants that I wanted to grow, it was essential that I improve the soil where they would grow, and adding organic matter, including compost, to that soil was the quickest way to improve it.

Down in our woodland areas, by contrast, the soil was dark brown, rich, humusy, and composed of beautiful pieces (in all sizes) of materials that were decomposing on their own---autumn leaves, tree twigs, limbs, bark, and even trunks. There were decaying plants of all kinds, including vines, groundcovers, shade-tolerant gtasses and wildflowers, etc. and also the decomposing bodies of insects, reptiles, small animals, sometimes large animals, etc. No one goes into the woods and piles up greens and browns, so everything just lies there where it fell and it all decomposes.

Every since we moved here, my goal has been to recreate that forest floor, with its rich, humusy soil in my garden plots. It is likely that I'll never have soil in my garden that is as good as the soil in my woodland, but that won't stop me from trying to improve that soil. I just try to do it in the easiest, simplest way possible. Making compost and amending soil isn't rocket science. If we stand still, look around us and observe nature in action, we'll see that Mother Nature functions just fine without our intervention.

There are some gardening tasks I put tons of effort into, but composting isn't one of them. For me, it is about picking my battles and choosing to spend my gardening hours in ways I enjoy the most. When we moved here, I already was a lifelong gardener who was fortunate to grow up not only in a gardening family with a huge extended family of gardeners, but also in a neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s where most of our neighbors had veggie gardens, fruit trees, berry brambles or bushes, herbs, flowers, etc. So, I grew up knowing all the gardening "rules", so to speak. By the time we moved here, I was about to turn 40 and I was tired of following all the rules, so I just threw away the rulebook and did what worked best for me. It is not a decision I regret. It is smart to read and research and see what works and why, what is recommended and what isn't, etc. but try to avoid worrying too much about what you can or can't do or should or shouldn't do. The fact is that no matter what you do, you're likely to have a beautiful and productive garden anyway.

When you first start gardening, whether you're growing grass, ornamental plants, trees, shrubs, vines, ground covers, or edible plants, you wan to do everything just exactly right. The longer I garden, though, the more I understand that there is not just one way to do things---there are many ways. What works for one person might not work for another. What works for a person one year in certain weather conditions might not work nearly as well the next year with drastically different conditions. You can work really hard at making compost, or you can just pile stuff up and let it rot. However you choose to do it, don't box yourself in to a certain way and decide it is the only way---there are many ways.

Happy Gardening,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: How To Test For Herbicide Carryover

Dawn that is an awesome detailed writing of how I want to garden, relaxed and not wasting time and fretting. so many people present one way of doing something and like row gardening, its not always the best for another person. when I first got to west tx I studied about improving my soil/sand and found GW and the compost section. I did it very meticulously... then I got a bigger garden and a job and was too busy and it still made compost for me even tho I quit turning watering etc. I have gotten away from composting here and really need to set one up at the slaughterhouse as soon as the tractor gets going.
kim

Kim,

Thanks. All I can say is follow your instincts, do what you want, and enjoy it.

To paraphrase that old saying "There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same." Follow your own path!

I had so many wonderful old farmer and rancher types that I met when we moved here and every one of them farmed conventionally (tractors, wide paths, narrow beds, no mulching, etc etc etc) and they spent years telling me how I was doing everything wrong. (Except for Fred---he always encouraged me and understood I was following my own path, not theirs!) After 3 or 4 years of watching my garden get better and better and more productive every year, they finally stopped telling me that I was doing everything wrong. It wasn't that they were wrong and I was right or I was wrong and they were right---it was that we did things in a very different way. They were almost outraged by my raised beds and mulch because "you can't get a tractor in there". lol lol lol I couldn't make them understand I didn't have a tractor, didn't want a tractor, and didn't intend to use a tractor. Some of them also ragged on me all the time because I mixed weeds (their description of my herbs and flowers used as companion plants) into my veggie garden, telling me repeatedly "you can't eat weeds".

I didn't try to convince them to do things my way, but they sure as heck were determined to convince me to do things their way. I was glad when they finally gave up, although one of them had the gall to tell me I wasn't going to get into heaven gardening that way. I had no response to that---I was just speechless. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was pretty discouraging to be told every day that I was doing everything wrong. What finally shut them up was that my garden produced more per square foot by far than theirs did, and it produced earlier. They couldn't argue with success. All of those old guys are gone now (not Fred...I still have Fred and he never was one of those old grumpy ones because he encouraged and supported me), and (oddly) I kinda miss them. Life is a lot less stressful, though, without every old guy in a pickup stopping by to tell me what I'm doing wrong today. (grin)

Blaze your own trail in your own garden, do what you want, keep what works, change what fails, and let your garden be an expression of you---your wants, your needs, your ideas, your experiments, and your art. People should be able to express their personality in their own garden. If not there, then where? I am not a painting-on-canvas artist, but in the garden, I am a growing-in-the-ground artist.

Dawn

Dawn, that sounds encouraging...and I totally understand your idea, but could never convince my parents of it. I guess you can't teach too many old dogs, new tricks.

I get 'But I always did it that way, why change what works?'.

Wow, Dawn, thanks again for all the info. I'm not a huge rule-follower either. My concerns are a couple of things
1. I really am new to this.
And
2. I'm in a hurry. I want tons of compost for the coming spring! haha! We finally sold our big house in town and here we are! I want to hurry up and do all the things I've dreamed about. (I know it's not that easy) In the next couple of weeks, we'll begin building our new garden areas. Finally decided the best places to put them--both regular gardens (do they have an official name?) and raised beds. My plan is to till/dig them up and put cardboard on top over the winter. We have many boxes left from the move.

The past few months have been practice really. I have a pre-made raised bed that I've been playing with. Peas and broccoli are in it now.

Thanks again. You're a great resource and I appreciate your time. And all the other helpful folks here.

dbarron,

Most old dogs don't want to learn new tricks, and I get that.

Sometimes I wonder why people won't change and try something new. I think folks get stuck in a rut and keep on gardening the same old way they always have instead of being willing to try something else. Some folks just don't like getting out of their comfort zone.

If I'm not trying something new each year, I feel like I might not be growing and advancing as a gardener.

Hazel, You're welcome.

1. We all were new gardeners once upon a time. Enjoy it. To me, much of the fun of gardening comes from learning what works, what doesn't, what we like, what we don't like, etc.

2. When we lived in Texas, our yard was almost totally shaded by huge, mature trees that were in all our neighbors' yards. I only had tiny sunny spots here and there where I could squeeze in a few veggies and herbs. I could grow all the flowers I wanted, as long as they were shade lovers. When we moved here, I went crazy growing anything and everything, just because I finally could since we had, essentially, an endless supply of sunny gardening spots. I hope you have as much fun with your new garden as I have had with mine.

Regular gardens are simply known as conventional gardens or gardens. I just call my garden by its location---the front garden or the back garden. The front garden is mostly raised beds, but there's a couple of areas where I grow at grade level. The back garden is all conventional, with plants growing at grade level, with no raised beds. Both work, and there's advantages and disadvantages to both. Part of the fun of gardening is experimenting to see what works best for you with your weather and climate, your soil, the varieties you choose to grow, etc. I cannot tell anyone else what will work best for them, only what I know from experience works for me. What I can tell you is that you never stop learning. I am in my 50s and have been gardening all my life, and I still learn new things all the time. I hope that never changes.

If gardening ever stops being fun and thrilling, exciting and rewarding, I'll stop doing it. I suspect, though, that I'll never stop because I cannot imagine gardening ever will stop being fun.

Dawn

Dawn, I can answer part of the question about "Old Dogs". Its not that we don't want to learn new tricks, Its because by the time we become Old Dogs out brains are so scrambled we cant even remember the tricks we once knew.

Larry,

Thanks for the laugh.

You are NOT an old dog, just a well-seasoned one.

Your comments remind me of an old saying "Now that I've got it all together, I can't remember where I put it." That is one that I can totally relate to. Every autumn when I am pulling out spent plants in order to clean up the garden, it is like a scavenger hunt. I find things that have been "lost" for months, and this usually includes a trowel or two, small hand pruners, scissors, etc. The other day I found a plastic stacking-type lawn chair in the garden, underneath the rampant growth of the Long Island Cheese pumpkin plant. All I could think was "Where did that chair come from? I didn't bring that in here." However, since the chair can't walk and I'm usually the only person who goes into the garden, I am sure I must have taken it in there.

My front garden rain gauge is lost in the front garden and I am hoping to find it soon. As plants enlarged and spread out over the course of the summer, I had to move it from one place to another almost weekly to keep it from getting lost beneath a bunch of vines and plants. I guess there was a week where I didn't move it, and it ended up lost in the jungle. No matter how often I have searched for it, I haven't found it yet. Of course, with all the snakes here, I haven't gone poking around into areas where there's dense growth. The rain gauge will show up eventually, and when it does, I'll probably be surprised and say "I had a rain gauge in here?"

I haven't lost all my marbles yet, but when I do, I bet we'll find them in the garden....if I still know what a garden is and what it is used for by that point.

Dawn