I have yet to get a successfully pollinated squash (summer, zuke, etc.). The boys and girls come out at different times, and since the blossoms last only 1 day, this isn't working out. I bought some bloom booster which I suspect may be a garden store marketing gimmick, but we'll see. Others have prolific amounts of zucchini and yellow squash at this point in the season...why am I having such a problem? Getting frustrated with this - it has been going on for a month now.... I would happily go out and pollinate them myself, if I could only get the male and female blossoms to produce at the same time! For those of you with tons of squash, what's your secret????

The rocks and red dirt are about a foot below the nice black thick layer of silt. The silt, the jar test to see what kind of soil I had looked like silt, is what I'm fixing. I don't like beds for reasons of water conservation, so I'm with you there, but then the trees growing near the garden are poisonous to some plants, and I seem to have one of each type of poisonous plant. Most are small enough I can cut, but about 6 or 7 of them, I can't without paying out some big money. They may fall on my house, someone elses house, or a passer by. So I'm not taking that responsibility underway. Now I've discovered that in order to build up silt at least. I talked with a few people and their garden did the same thing, but they don't have any problems usually. This has been two years for me, the first time I tried to grow one 2 years ago, and I want a good garden. My amendments were making my own compost, digging to airiate the soil, and now I want to try finding some plants with extensive root systems that will leave that organic matter when the plant dies. This is supposed to be the best fix. Does anyone know of any plants that will do this? I thought it was funny one of the recommendations were corn, because the corn was the worst plant I tried to grow. I learned that the corn was planted too shallow and it caused it to be too easily susceptible to the first cold weather when it was planted, the drought weather we've had, and then the periods of constant rain, all of which damage shallow root systems of corn. The fix is to plant corn in a ditch, trough, ridge, whatever you want to call it, but it's 6 inch deep row dug out, plant the corn about 1 and 1/2 inch deep, let it grow to about 4 feet, then fill the hole in around it, the corn is supposed to grow great then. You are not supposed to see corn roots on top of the ground, which mine were visible and the plants would tip over very easily, so that should have been a sign. Next year will be the last year before I go into container planting or greenhouse planting. If this doesn't work with the corn and composting, to avoid a serious watering bill with raised beds, I am going straight to container gardening with some kind of mulch and shading over it in a greenhouse. It's easy to root water in a greenhouse per plant. If it really is the poisons in the dirt, next year I will know for sure, and probably get a sample to send in professionally to verify it. It's cheaper than doing all this stuff and it not working. I've talked with a lot of people, and this year all of their gardens died for no reason, their okra didn't grow, etc., etc., so I really believe with all the rain we had at once, it is run off on top of their gardens. There was too many different changes that lasted weeks at a time in extreme, rainy or drought, that it really hit the gardens hard. One more year, and I guess it will be container gardening for me. To alter every native plant in the yard to plant a vegetable garden, might not be a good idea. Does anyone know of invasive massive root forming plants that are very hard to get rid of, but are annuals? I planted rye grass to two small patches, it seem to be growing fine. Clover and I guess spinach strawberries? are wild and small growing everywhere. I don't really have large weeds in my garden, but some pop up. I was just hoping if anyone knows of any plants or even native plants of Tennessee that will leave large root system after they are dead and gone in the soil, it would be nice to read up on them!

Well, since I made the original post, I top dressed with a mixture of MG potting mix and my own compost, which is mostly leaves and kitchen scraps. I also watered with MG for tomatoes, and poured some very diluted fish emulsion on everything. Here's the update (3 days later). Everything BUT the tomatoes look a world better. the broccoli, carrots, beets, lettuce, onions, leeks, and peppers all grew overnight and look greener and healthier in general. I think the tomatoes have put on some new growth, and they have continued to get new flowers and set fruit, but they leaves are still all curled, and the plant in general has a sad look to it. I'm still at a loss about what the exact problem is, but I'm leaning toward it being a combination of poor nutrition and perhaps some herbicide drift from the neighbor's application. I think we are going to give the tomatoes some time, but we're also going to build one more SWC and get a couple tomato plants from the nursery, just as a back up. The two cherry tomato plants (sweet 100 and husky cherry) in our SWC are absolutely thriving - I think we will do more of those next year! Thanks to everyone for the input. I will update in a couple weeks to let you know if they lived or not! Granny - my tomatoes do look a lot like the over fertilized ones on EG's blog, but since everything else in the garden showed such overnight improvement when I fertilized, I have to think that at least one of the problems was lack of nutrients. But since the toms are the closest to the neighbor's yard, it very well may be herbicide damage as well.

There are different types of clay, some are extremely expansive and others are actually fairly stable. It is hard to say what caused the popping in the photo without more info. Most stories of popped pools are due to the pool being empty and then the water table rises due to excessive rains. When that happens it basically floats the pool right out of the hole. But since your neighbor's pool had water in it when it popped, I'm guessing you're sitting on some very expansive clays and possibly his pool was installed during dry conditions and it rose 4" after some wetter weather as the clays expanded. Then when he emptied it, it made things worse because the water table was so high it just floated the pool. If you are on highly expansive clays, you need to be very concerned about the subgrade prep regardless of what kind of pool you put in. There are things that can be done such as installing the pool on piers, moisture treating the subgrade, installing a drainage system and/ or over-excavating the dig and putting in select fill. I would highly recommend getting a structural engineer involved through the PB. If the PB says not to worry about it, they do this all the time and it will be fine; then look for another PB! Good luck!