My area in southeast, Pa. has a hard pan clay soil. If you dig a hole and fill it with water. The water will still be there two weeks later. When I started my garden thirteen years ago, I took a ten soil samples and combined them, dried the sample, than screen it through a piece of window screening. Than I brought a test kit from Penn State Cooperative Extension Service. You can get a test kit in states that have agricultural colleges. My kit was $8, now it is $9. Follow the instructions and send it in. You will get back the results NPK plus information on amendments to the soil. My soil I added 12 bails of peat moss, bar sand, lime, compost.Till it all in. Walla!

Of lately, but not always, I have been putting my potatoes in a shallow trench, maybe four inches, covering with dirt but not to the top of the trench and covering that with a foot to sixteen inches of leaves, or straw if I run out of leaves. If you trench down up to eight inches, the deepest I have planted but then I did not trench then, I simply dug a hole, one does not really need to hill, just check for potatoes maybe reaching the surface. You can then simply put soil over the potato or use some sort of mulch. When I dig even with the shallow method, I bury the vines in the "hole" the old one came out of (I actually make a hole) as the potato vines leave the soil in fantastic conditon the next spring, although it is not a good idea to plant potatoes in the same area year after year after year after year unless you amend the soil. This year as I had a box that had been left out in the rain and was just nasty looking, I took Miracid and spread it over the area of one potatoe plot and roto-tilled it in before planting. I did notice the plants that came up in that plot were definitely a deeper green, but that, outside of making the soil more acidic which is good, does not do much for potato size or quality.

I think it's unlikely. Powdery mildew is caused by alot of different pathogens. Pathogens that can be different genera, species, or strains of the same species. And each of these can be very specific as to what it attacks and lives on. So for example powdery mildew on peppers is caused by diff organism than powdery mildew on clover. Symptoms may be similar, or at least to the naked eye. So I'd suspect that "powdery mildew" wouldn;t "jump" from a plant like clover to other veggies.

Dorothy, It has worked for a long time. Maybe for 7 or 8 years now. I've never once had a deer jump it, but on the rare occasion that I've left the gate open at night (OOPS!), I have come outside in the early morning around sunrise and found deer in the garden. Because they saw me (and even though I quickly retreated indoors to avoid frightening them), they wouldn't leave though the gate, and did manage by repeatedly jumping to eventually get over the top of the fence from inside the garden. They did a lot of damage during their mad stampede of running around wildly inside the garden trying repeatedly to jump the fence. I learned a lesson then about double-checking the gate at night to make sure it was closed and firmly latched. Everyone I know here has had success with an 8' fence, but I know that in some parts of the country, it takes a 10' fence. Some years I have had deer loitering just outside the garden fence repeatedly, sometimes even when they could clearly see me inside the garden (Hint: always close the gate behind yourself or you may find a deer coming in through the gate while you're inside the garden, and guess how I know that). I felt like those deer absolutely were planning to jump the 8' fence and I was worried they might succeed, so I tied white Wal-mart bags to the fence at roughly a deer eye level. I think any white material would work, it is just that at that point in time, white Wal-Mart bags were what I had. I tied them every 6' or 8'. They were tied so that they would flutter in the breeze. Because white-tailed deer use their white tails to signal danger to one another, I was hoping white fluttering bags would send a "Danger! Flee!" signal to any deer contemplating jumping the fence. It seemed to work. Those loitering deer went away. I thought that maybe one reason my 8' fence worked in the front garden was because the woodland comes up almost to the fence on two sides (north and west) and the driveway is on the south side, with the barbed wire property line fence just a few feet south of the driveway. I figured that at least on those three sides, deer found it hard to get a running start to leap an 8' fence. The east side had no real obstructions, but it slopes downhill which might discourage jumping the fence from that side. When we built the new back garden three years ago, we put up a sturdier woven wire fence than we have in the front garden. We used landscape timbers for poles and a very heavy gauge woven wire fencing material. That garden has wide-open land on all sides and I was worried deer would jump that fence because several deer trails run though that area. They've never made it over that 8' fence and into the garden, and I've never even seen any sign that they've tried. I've also noticed that the professional game/hunting ranches both here in our county and across the Red River in Montague County, TX, have 8' high fences, so they must find that the 8' high fences keep their deer contained within. However, those game ranches mostly have heavy timber along the fence lines and that might help keep their deer from jumping since the trees are so close to their fences. Dawn