Maybe only with gardening and politics could you get this many people to listen to talk about fertilizer. There are more follow-ups to these talks about blueberries than any other topics on hear. After reading some of it, I got interested and googled for more stuff about it. I go to a local garden center to buy plants and stuff most of the time instead of the big chains. Even though the prices are sometimes higher the people are lots more helpful. Now I am confused because what I found in science articles about on the internet is the opposite of what everybody at the garden center told me. They always told me to give nitrogen for more leaves and phosphorus for more roots. I asked if the potash was for more more fruit or vegetables but they said not it meant potassium and never said how to tell if your plants want more. My doctor used to tell me when he gave me prescriptions diuretics for PMS that if I graved bananas, I needed more potassium. Since I can't tell if my plants have banana cravings, how do you tell if they need more potash or potasium? From what I can find on the internet it sounds like the stuff about phosphorus and roots is a old wifes tale and not really correct. I tried that google scholar thing that somebody mentioned to find science stuff about it instead of just people talking. Every real science kind of thing I can find on internet seems to say that most dirt except sand has all the phosphorus that plants needs. For real science stuff about nitrogen I found only found things saying it caused tomatos and stuff to only make leaves and have problems. Unless the plant is yellow it seems to say its more bad than good. Except for farmers that take everything out of the dirt by growing same things everyyear, it says that regular people don't really need to add much except for pots where watering washes everything away. I tried to find the thing that somebody said Cornel said about nitrogen keeping trees alive but google only pointed be back to this follow-ups. How can you really tell whats best for blueberries except for acid soil? Is this thing about all the men on here wanting to pee on everything because they are still marking turf like boy dogs? After you men pee on your blue berry bushes do all the dogs in the neighborhood come by to raise their leg on them too? I think I will use vinegar.

Tropical, I don't understand how in San Francisco you don't have enough heat and sun for tomatoes. It seemed to me that there was a perfect weather there for gardening, with the perfect mixture of moderate but quite high temperatures, and the high humidity. But then perhaps it varies with the exact place, whether you're on the coast or in the hills ? Anyway it's a great place to be ! As for fresh hot compost, as I only moved in my place with garden last year, I had no time to get the garden ready for my tomatoes and planted some in hot piles of poop or hot piles of manure in May. Results : one plant died at once in the manure pile. The Black Krim produced only a few enormous and very tasty toms, the Pink of Bern and Jersey Devil produced many very good toms. But they were all a bit soft, as if overriped. Those that did best were Stupice and Zebra, red and green, and pumpkins and zucchinis. But the supports all collapsed because the heaps shrinked, and bermuda grass just overgrew everything. So at the end it was just a big mess of leaves, grass, and snails and slugs having the party of their lives eating the toms hidden on the ground ! As for the stupice that is quite hardy and rising quite high without help, the green stink bugs enjoyed turning them into cork ! All this was great fun and a good experiment and I'll try to do better next spring thanks to everything I learn here !

About soil tests......if you have never had one it is not a bad idea to get one done just to see what you are working with. That is the only way you can determine if you have any nutrient deficiencies you need to address. (caveat: home test kits are pretty much worthless - pay the bucks and have a professional lab prepare the test). You don't do multiple tests around the property. You gather soil from a variety of areas (your prime planting areas) and mix it together in a single sample. Most labs will tell you how to prepare the test sample and will ask what you are growing - crops, lawn, ornamentals. That will help them customize your test results. Once you get the results back, they will tell you your current nutrient load and if you need to amend at all. Generally, the only addition recommended will be nitrogen as that is the most mobile and transitory of the primary plant nutrients and the one most often lacking. And adding organic matter - compost - is the easiest and one of the most environmentally friendly ways to add nitrogen to an existing garden. Additionally, compost provides a full range of other nutrients in a low dose, organic process that encourages a healthy soil biology and discourages leaching into groundwater as one encounters with synthetic nutrients (from chemical fertilizers). Compost also improves soil structure, loosening heavy or clay soils, improving drainage and adding a degree of moisture retention to very sandy soils. If used as a mulch it will supress weed development, reduce evaporation of soil moisture and provide insulating capacities. It does however make a rather fertile seed bed for windblown weed seeds so some monitoring is required. I guess you are all going to do what you are going to do but fwiw, there is NO scientific evidence that dosing plants with epsom salts/magnesium sulfate encourages blooming. There is absolutely nothing in the product that affects a plant's biological inclination to bloom or not to bloom. Understanding how necessary plant nutrients work - or don't work - would go a long way in dispelling some of these myths about "miracle" fertilizers (ie. MiracleGro and its cousins) and other miraculous plant potions.

Here's more info from an article (link below). 'The study only found a link between vitamins and increased risk of death; it didn't prove that the supplements caused the deaths. The authors say the reasons behind their findings aren't clear..... To conduct the study, Mursu led a team who analyzed data from the Iowa Women's Health Study. The women in that study filled out 16-page questionnaires in 1986 about their diet, their use of vitamins and their general health. They recorded their of use of multivitamins, vitamins A, C, D and E as well as beta-carotene, B vitamins and minerals such as calcium, copper, magnesium, selenium and zinc. They were asked again about their supplement use in 1997 and 2004. The proportion of women who said they took one or more vitamin supplement soared during the study period, from 62.7 per cent in 1986 to 85.1 per cent in 2004. The researchers found that over the 19 years of follow-up, 41 per cent of multivitamin users died, compared to 40 per cent of non-users.' So basically, over 19 years, they were given a survey to take three times. The survey was self-reporting, which is not always the most reliable, as people tend to over or under estimate and report things about their compliance and general health...and there was only a 1% difference in mortality. I bet big pharmacuetical companies are jumping for joy about this study. Now we can all go to our doctors and get more pills for things that vitamins may have helped. Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro-vitamin (I rarely take them myself), but I'm pro-not believing everything you read. Here is a link that might be useful: Study about vitamins