Is ‘garden soil’ really worth it for vegetable gardens?
Heruga (7a Northern NJ)
3 years ago
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Soil safe for vegetable garden?
Comments (20)I don't know of heavy mining areas near Rolla. The two big lead belts are east of there (downwind) around Potosi, De Soto, Farmington area, south of STL; and far to the southwest, around Joplin. You have to be pretty close to be affected because the dust doesn't travel that far. I suppose there could have been smaller operations around you but they are still researching and finding all those and investigating them. Were you ever tested for blood lead? Probably not since they weren't doing that when you were little, and they don't do it for adults unless there is a reason. Children are the most sensitive population. If you got through school OK and didn't have behavioral and health problems as a child, it's doubtful you were exposed to lead....See MoreClay Soil Vegetable Garden
Comments (9)you are talking about 150 sq ft garden, it ain't gonna take THAT much sand. around here the ratio is 50%. but it depends on just how much and what TYPE clay you have. red clay is already sandy so you use less, while our blue/grey clay has very little sand. i don't know about your area, but i can get a 12 yard truck of sand delivered for around 100.00. they will even dump it in several piles for you. for our clay if you want 6 inches of good topsoil, you need to add 3 inches of sand to the top and then till to a 6" depth. if you want 12inches, you add 6". eitherway, the effect is immediate and PERMANENT. adding organic mus tbe done every year. i recommend doing the sand and still add in organics annually to keep the soil healthy....See MoreIs a Tower Garden really worth $500?
Comments (144)Obviously late to the party, but am really interested in indoor gardening, especially for people in apartments or other small spaces who don't have sufficient light (~99.9999% of almost any indoor location for veggies). I found this post b/c I was looking for tower garden reviews. I also found one called iGarden and Gardyn. One mentioned earlier, Green Diamond, looked like it was for a farm. I have two reasons for inquiring. One is my own, personal reason: I don't have tons of time, but would really, really, really love to have fresh veggies, including tomatoes - grown indoors. (I live in a condo with no balcony.) This other is because I have a small nonprofit [yes, 501(c)(3)], and one of its missions is to have sustainable buildings and environs - which also includes the ability for people to grow at least some of their own food in their apartments! With regard to the second reason, whatever solution must be energy efficient since one of our goals is to develop sustainable affordable housing - but, as executive director, I would like to also see some sort of program for very low income: many live in food deserts and most have a similar situation to me (apartment, no balcony). The system must be plug and play or close to it. I know a lot of people who work up to three (!) jobs, and still have trouble making ends meet. So many people may not have high income, but they are extremely busy. [Although it might be nice to develop a DYI system and methodology and point some of these people to that, b/c not everyone's working 18 hour days and, of course, some or retired or are otherwise not working FT.] Thanks so much in advance for your advice! I super appreciate it!...See MorePreparing soil for a vegetable garden
Comments (29)Our deer eat zucchini, summer squash, winter squash and pumpkin plants down to the ground...big prickly leaves, fruit, vines, flowers and all...when they are hungry enough. Maybe your deer won't, but if you're in a part of OK that is in some degree of drought when growing season rolls around and the deer are very hungry, you should know that there is very little they won't eat. Before we put up the 8' tall fence, they'd jump the shorter fence and literally eat every single plant down to the ground overnight. Every single one. It was shocking. Nowadays, they only get to eat anything that sticks out thru the fence, which is precious little. I learned my lessons from the deer long ago. Because of past and ongoing issues with bobcats and coyotes, and a couple of horrible years with an occasional cougar passing through, none of our animals are outside after dark. I suspect our dogs would keep the deer away, but leaving them out is too risky. Two of our dogs survived a battle with coyotes and I don't want for any of us to ever go through that again----and it was in the middle of the day in winter, not even at night or anywhere close to either morning or evening. The coyotes are really bad around here this year, so folks are having more than the usual amount of trouble with deer gathering in their yards and eating shrubs and stuff right now. We expect it is because the deer are fleeing the river bottom lands along the Red River and coming up into our rural neighborhood on higher ground to get away from the coyotes. Considering we have coyotes coming through our property every night and sometimes even in the middle of the day, I don't know how the deer think they are getting away from the coyotes, but maybe it is just the deer feel safer closer to homes. A friend told me yesterday that her neighbors were out shooting guns at 2 a.m. right in their front yard, and we concluded they likely were trying to run off the coyotes that probably were in their yard. Snakes here are so plentiful and always will be. We're just too close to the river and to a lot of Wildlife Management Area land. I just have had to learn to be really, really careful when I'm outdoors. Sadly the venomous snakes seem to outnumber the nonvenomous ones a great deal, because I've been able to learn to tolerate the presence of some of the smaller, non-venomous ones, as long as they aren't rat snakes and chicken snakes that are eating our eggs and chickens. You can put diseased plants on a hot compost pile (one that gets steaming hot in the middle) if you choose, but not on a cold pile that doesn't attain the right level of heat. Sometimes I do just bag up diseased plants and trash them because my summer compost piles have a hard time achieving any heat since the wildlife and the free-ranging poultry dig through them multiple times daily and scatter stuff everywhere. I rake the piles back up, but they generally keep the piles from staying piled up long enough to build up any heat....and they eat anything that would decompose enough to create heat. We ought to fence off the compost piles to keep the wild things out of them, but then I'd feel guilty in drought years when the wild things really are starving and need any morsel of food they can find. It is a delicate balance sometimes, striving to compost and to maintain a nice, productive garden while also trying to peacefully co-exist with the wildlife as much as one possibly can. After two very wet years in our county in 2015 and 2016, we have had more plant diseases than usual, so I've been pretty careful to make sure the compost piles have gotten hot this past year---I've added more chicken manure to them than usual, but the chickens even dig and scratch their way through all their own manure nonstop all day long once I put it on the compost piles. I still drop a lot of diseased plants into the pathways of the garden, which are heavily mulched, and don't worry excessively about them because I add new layers of grass clippings to the paths weekly, so the diseased plants get buried quickly---often the same day I remove them from the beds. I don't leave the clippings on the lawn to feed the soil. I want to keep the lawn soil as poor and pitiful as possible because I don't want for the bermuda grass to grow any more vigorously than it already does! We didn't plant the bermuda. We didn't see any bermuda grass when we walked this property numerous times before we bought it and built our house. What happened is that everything was head-high native pastures and woodlands when we bought it. When we mowed down the pasture in the area where the house was going to be built, it was the end of summer in a very bad drought year here and no grass regrew. Then, in the spring, bermuda grass sprang up everywhere around the house. One of our old farmer neighbors stopped by and saw the green sprigs of bermuda grass and was gleeful. He excitedly told us that we were lucky because we wouldn't have to plant a lawn. My reaction was a very dry "Yippee. Lucky us." Ha! I was already trying to figure out how to get rid of it, though I expect it always will be with us. I merely consider the bermuda lawn grass to be a source of grass clippings to use in the garden as mulch---I wouldn't be sorry if it died---and I do nothing to encourage it, but I also know it is never going to go away. Dawn...See Morerobert567
3 years agoHeruga (7a Northern NJ)
3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agoDonna Frost
3 years agol pinkmountain
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agogardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agofloral_uk z.8/9 SW UK
3 years agogardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agol pinkmountain
3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agogardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years agoJohn D Zn6a PIT Pa
3 years ago
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