Hey Sojay, Do you use craigslist? I'd put up a barter ad and find someone who does can. Maybe someone is near you that can't garden anymore but still has their canner and jars and would be willing to help can for half the results. If you're thinking of canning at some point, helping someone else can is a great way to see if you like it. We put up lots of tomatoes in half gallon jars for chili in the winter.

Here's the study. Surendra K. Pradhan was interviewed on CBC radio this week. Discussing the benefits of urine as a fertilizer, on public radio - it's a new day. He suggested a time lapse of a few days between applying the urine and the wood ash, to avoid ammonia offgassing. By coincidence, or intuition, we've been tossing urine and wood ashes, and occasionally manure, on our scrubby roadside wild rose hedge in hopes it would grow and help block the sight and sound of traffic. The hedge, which was growing virtually in gravel, is now three times the height and breadth it was ten years ago, blooming beautifully, and admired by visitors. It's maybe not surprising that so much groundbreaking R&D on waste-separating toilets and waste as fertilizer is coming from northern countries like Finland and Sweden. My sister-in-law, an outpost nurse in rocky northern Canada, says heaps of disposable diapers can be seen in the brush around communities from the air as she flies in - there's nowhere or way to bury them. Here is a link that might be useful: study

Chasing pH is a futile endeavor. Well, that depends on what your goals are, what your pH is and your access to resources. You're trying to push your pH from an 8+ in calcareous clay down to a 5.0 and you're on a budget? Yeah. That's pretty futile. Now let's say you've got a pH of 7.5 in a sandy soil with no lime and would like to shift it down to 7.0 or even a little acid so that your maple will stop showing symptoms of alkalinity induced chlorosis. Let's also say you have the means to buy some sulfur (and/or iron sulfate) pre-plant and use acidifying fertilizers to keep the pH down over time? Not futile at all. In fact, it's really common. As free hydrogen is replaced by anions (e.g. calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium) the pH rises. Well, not really. pH is not a relationship of hydrogen to other cations. pH is an expression of the relationship between hydrogen and hydroxide (OH-). Note that hydroxide is an anion. That's why you can always calculate your pOH if you know your H+ concentration and vice-versa. You will never be able to calculate your pH from your concentration of other cations. At pH 7.0 and above there is no free hydrogen in the soil.Actually, if you have a pH of 7.0, that means that the concentration of hydrogen is exactly the same as the concentration of hydroxide in the soil solution. If you had no hydrogen your pH would be 14 and your pOH would be 0. I think you may be thinking of exchange sites on colloids. If you have a pH of 7.0 or above you may indeed have 0% hydrogen (or actually so close that it is reported as 0% on a base saturation analysis). Also, you can't raise your pH by just picking a cation and increasing it. That's why you won't get an increase in pH from adding gypsum (calcium sulfate) except under special circumstances.

Sorry for the delayed response. The site wouldn't let me log on yesterday. We put the garden in 4 years ago (this being the 4th summer season). We brought in very good soil for the beds- lots of manure, worm castings, bat guano, etc, so I used minimal fertilizer. The crop was great. The next two seasons, I added very rich planting mix to all the holes as I planted, and used some additional fertilizer throughout the season. All I could figure was that the soil was too rich, so although I added the planting mix this year, I've not fertilized them yet this year. I've got 13 plants and have yeilded a mere 4 zucchini. We live on a mountaintop, and the garden receives full sun all day long. They get drip irrigation twice a day, but not enough to waterlog the soil. The foliage and the blossoms are large, colorful and healthy, but the blooms remain sealed. Should I fertilize more? I use either a 10-10-10 or a 5-10-10. Do they require more of one mineral than another? Zucchini is my husband's favorite vegetable, and I feel like a complete idiot not being able to grow the easiest and most prolific plant on the planet!