Fertilizers « The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

July 8, 2014

Nitrogen deficiency in sweet corn

Filed under: Fertilizers,Vegetables — bob @ 2:21 pm

I just got back from a relaxing week-long vacation at Bear Lake in northern Michigan.

The first thing I did, even before unloading the car, was to take a look at the garden. It’s amazing how much a garden changes in a week at this time of year.

Everything looked great except for my sweet corn; it’s looking a bit peaked. The lower leaves are turning yellow, which is a sure sign of nitrogen deficiency.

If plants can’t get enough nitrogen from the soil, they will rob it from older leaves and use it to grow new leaves — that’s what causes the discoloration.

Plant use nitrogen to make chlorophyll, the green part of a leaf that is responsible for photosynthesis .

I can trace the problem back to last season. In that spot last year, I mulched the growing vegetables with a generous covering of wheat straw. This spring, instead of raking out the old mulch, I left it in place and tilled it under.

Since then, soil microorganisms have been working overtime trying to decompose all of that straw. They require loads of nitrogen to do the work of decomposition. As a result, there is not much nitrogen left over for the sweet corn to use.

Now I’ll have to add nitrogen fertilizer to make up the difference. I have some urea fertilizer left in a fifty-pound bag that I have been dipping into for several years now, it’s finally almost empty.

Urea is an artificial fertilizer that contains forty six percent nitrogen and nothing else. That makes it a “hot” fertilizer, meaning it is very easy to burn growing plants with it if you’re not careful. I like to mix it with sand to help make it easier to spread evenly.

Other types of fertilizers, such as fish emulsion and blood meal, contain nitrogen in a different form and will provide nitrogen without the danger of plant damage. Because those types of fertilizers contain less nitrogen on a pound for pound basis as urea, you’ll have to apply more to get the same results.

Nitrogen deficiency results in weaker plants and lower yields so it’s a good idea to correct the problem early, while the plants still have time to recover.

Bob

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June 12, 2014

Elixir for ailing plants

Filed under: Fertilizers — bob @ 9:32 am

Whenever I have a plant that is weak or not doing well, I give it a dose of a special homemade brew. This concoction is liquid manure also known as manure tea.

There’s nothing new about manure tea, it’s been used by generations upon generations of gardeners. There are many recipes for brewing manure tea, most of them involve making a giant tea bag out of a burlap bag. Some gardeners let the bag steep for a certain amount of time before using it. Others add their own secrete ingredients. None of that is really necessary.

The simplest formula is simply a mixture barnyard manure and water. I like to use manure that’s been rotting down in a pile and mellowing for a bit.

I add one shovelful of manure to a five gallon bucket of water and stir it up with the shovel. The ratio of manure to water varies depending on the the type of manure, the age of the manure and how much bedding is present in the manure. Bedding is usually straw but can also be wood shavings, shredded paper or other kind of absorbent material.

You have to experiment a bit in order to reach the mix that works best for you. It’s a good idea to start out with a weak mixture first so you don’t damage any plants. With that being said however, I’ve never had a case of plant damage due to the use of manure tea.

Manure tea has a value as fertilizer but there is more to it than that. There seems to be something in it that is very beneficial to plants. Ailing plants can sometimes respond dramatically to manure tea.

A dose of manure tea will help these weak seedlings.

Since I raise chickens, I use partially decomposed chicken manure in my mix but any barnyard manure will do — cow, pig, horse. Do not under any circumstances use cat manure or dog droppings. Besides being just plain gross, cat and dog manure can carry parasites that will contaminate your garden.

If you don’t have access to barnyard manure, compost tea is a great substitute. Not too many decades ago compost was called “artificial manure”. Follow the same procedure for mixing, adjust the ratio to your conditions.

To use manure tea, apply it to the soil at the base of the plant with a watering can. You can strain the larger particles out to make it easier to pour.

Any sludge left at the bottom can be remixed with more water for a weaker solution or added to the compost pile or garden directly.

Bob

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November 16, 2012

Lime Garden in the Fall

Filed under: Fertilizers,Soil — bob @ 6:06 pm

The weather people are predicting a string of nice days through the weekend and into next week. Many of us will looking for things to do out in the yard and garden.

Because November is the ideal time to apply lime, this weekend would be a good time to check the pH of your garden soil. If you have been fertilizing your garden regularly for several years in a row, the chances are your soil may need lime.

Lime is a calcium-based soil amendment that farmers and gardeners use to sweeten garden soil — raise the soil pH.

It’s not a good idea to just guess if your soil pH is low, your soil has to be tested. Fortunately, this is one test you can do yourself with a pH test kit from a garden center. These kits are pretty accurate. Just make sure you buy a fresh test kit because the test-chemicals will get old over time and produce an inaccurate reading.

There are several different types of lime and each type has a different application rate. Don’t worry though, all lime containers have application instructions printed on them. The amounts are usually given in pounds per 100 square feet or 1,000 square feet depending on the size of the bag.

In many cases a five pound bag of lime will be all you need to treat 100 square feet of soil.

Keep in mind, that sandy soils need liming more frequently than loam or clay soils.

Lawns too, will benefit from a fall application of lime if the soil pH tests low.

So, there’s your excuse to head out to the garden center, pick up some supplies and get some productive work done in your garden.

Bob

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April 1, 2011

Test Soil pH Before Adding Lime

Filed under: Fertilizers,Soil — bob @ 9:55 am

Fall is the best time of year to add lime to your garden soil. This gives the lime plenty of time to react with the soil chemistry and do its job raising the pH of the soil. The next best time to apply lime is right now, in early spring. There are several weeks to go until the gardening season is in full swing and any lime applied now will still have some time to react.

Some gardeners add lime to their gardens quite regularly without really knowing if the soil needs it or not. If you ask why often the answer is, “we always add lime”.

Lime is a generic term for different types of calcium products. It is used to sweeten soils or raise soil pH.

Adding lime without testing the soil first is setting you up for problems in the future. Too much lime will cause such a rise in soil pH that some nutrients in the soil will no longer be available to your plants.

Lime induced chlorosis is one typical problem we see. In this case the leaves of the garden plants begin to turn yellow due to lack of iron. Iron is needed by plants and is readily available in low pH or sour soils. As the pH rises, less and less iron is available for the plant to use until a point is reached where symptoms start to show up.

A sample of your garden soil can be tested by a soils lab. Soil pH is routinely tested along with critical soil minerals. The most reliable tests are available through the County Extension Office.

At the very least do your garden a favor, pick up a soil pH test kit from the garden center and test the pH yourself. Most of the pH tests are fine for home garden use.

Bob

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January 16, 2010

Black Gold? Biochar

Filed under: Energy,Fertilizers — bob @ 11:09 am

Many years ago, when I was just a kid, I learned from my Dad that all things being equal, the darker color a soil appears, the more fertile it is. I thought about that for awhile. In my young brain I thought, ‘well then why not color the soil using coal or something like that, after all isn’t coal just really old, compressed trees and plants’ ? That idea was dismissed later by someone I knew as being just an over-simplified childish idea.

As it turns out, 100′s of years ago in the Amazon River area, the people living there were actually using a similar technique to improve the soil. They were burning wood in such a way to make charcoal. This charcoal was then added to the soil as a “fertilizer”.

The charcoal added some minerals, such as potash and the like. Its main function was to improved the soil texture and retain plant nutrients to make them available for growing crops.

Archaeologists have discovered that the remains of these ancient gardens treated with charcoal are much more fertile that the surrounding areas, even after all of those centuries have passed. Plus, the carbon that was created from that process is still pretty much in tact.

Fast forward to the present day. Scientists have told us that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels released into the atmosphere has built up to a point where it is affecting our weather and we need to do something about it.

A major problem with carbon dioxide is that it is a gas and as such is hard to keep from being released into the air. So scientists have developed a few schemes to deal with this gas, such as pumping it into underground caverns, or trying to chemically combine it with calcium to make calcium carbonate.

Another problem with carbon dioxide is that as CO2 it contains 2 oxygen molecules for every 1 carbon molecule, so it is not “pure carbon”.

Charcoal, on the other hand, is nearly 100% carbon, no oxygen. It is also a solid, so it will not escape into the air…ever. In the soil it will very,very slowly release carbon. It is not poisonous and as was pointed out earlier, it actually is a beneficial substance.

A tree is also a solid and holds carbon. The difference with a tree is that even though it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and holds it in the form of wood, the tree will eventually die, decompose and re-release all of that carbon back into the atmosphere. It may take a couple of hundred years but it will happen.

Charcoal is made from burning wood or other plant material in the absence of oxygen. The ancient South American Indians produced their charcoal in specially designed pits. Now days, we can use a more controlled process to produce our charcoal. By manipulating combustion temperatures, the charcoal produced can be converted into a more refined product called “biochar”.

Our modern biochar process produces other gases that can be siphoned off and used to fuel the charcoal making process itself plus still have enough surplus gases left over to produce bio-fuel for powering electrical generators.

Where do we get the raw materials for biochar? Some proponents of biochar propose that we harvest trees to use as the raw material. I saw an estimate somewhere that in order to remove the amount of CO2 we produce in a year, we would need to cut down around 4% of our trees annually. That is a huge amount of trees, we would need to form an entire new industry just to cut trees and re-plant them. That would certainly help with our unemployment situation.

Others in the biochar industry feel that farmers could be paid for their unused plant materials such as corn stalks or wheat stubble and use that as the material for biochar. The farmers would then need to purchase the processed biochar as a soil amendment to replenish the carbon in their soil lost during crop production.

Biochar seems to be as close to a “magic silver bullet” as anything out there for reducing carbon dioxide. If you add soil replenishment and new jobs, you get a three for one deal.

Maybe this is that “Green Industry” that Governor Grandholm has been looking for.

Bob

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