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Fire Ants in the Garden – Part 2

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How well do organic methods of getting rid of fire ants work? Like other organic pest control methods, the options available are variably successful, and most need to be repeated to get really good results.

University of Florida has posted that the boiling water method has a 20-60% success rate. Repeat applications improve success, but there is a reminder that boiling hot water kills nearby plants, too, and will need to be used with caution.

University of Texas Extension personnel have done some preliminary research on homeowner options for getting rid of fire ants. They compared a chemical control, a DIY recipe for a mound drench that contains orange oil (d-Limonene), a sesame-oil based product (organic), and a drench of just plain water — not boiling.

It is not super-surprising that the chemical control worked best, but the the DIY orange-oil recipe worked pretty well, too. The sesame-oil based product worked to a much lesser extent, but definitely showed some control action when compared to the plain water treatment.

The success of the organic products is good news for organic gardeners.

If you want to try the University of Texas orange oil recipe for organic fire ant control, here it is:

1.5 fl oz Medina® Orange Oil and 3 fl oz Dawn® Soap/ gal water per mound.

In addition to working pretty well, using the orange oil recipe did not kill nearby plants. That is something that gardeners all will be glad to hear!

Would you like to know what doesn’t work, according to the University of Florida? Grits, club soda, soap, wood ashes, and shoveling mounds together.

Fire Ants in the Garden – Organic Control

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No gardener wants to encounter fire ants in the garden, but sometimes we find that they have moved in, unwanted. Getting rid of these pain-inflicting invaders can take some persistence, but options for organic control do exist. Knowing a little about the biology of these ants can help a gardener plan a successful counter-attack.

Flattened fire ant mound with deer hoof print in the middle.
Flattened fire ant “mound” shows deer hoof print. PHOTO/Amygwh

Fire ants do not tolerate freezing weather very well. If you treat a fire ant mound in fall, even if the whole mound isn’t dead within a few weeks, enough workers can be killed that the rest of the colony doesn’t survive the winter.

In spring and fall, too, most of the ants in a colony will be closer to the surface, so that a mound drench type of product has a good chance of reaching all of them.

In other words, both fall and spring are when organic controls are more likely to work well. Killing off smaller colonies in fall will also reduce the number of new colonies next spring, when mated queens that survived the winter will fly off to start new colonies.

The very first control to try, though, doesn’t use any products at all. On a cool day after a rain (when more ants are nearer the surface), pour a few gallons of boiling water on the mound, starting by circling the mound a foot or so away and then pouring the rest right on the mound. If this doesn’t kill the whole colony, move on to “Plan B”, a purchased mound-drench or a bait. (NOTE: Boiling hot water can burn people when accidentally spilled, and it will also kill plants near the mound it is being poured on. Please handle boiling water carefully, and do not use it near trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, or other desired plants.)

Another option is called “bucketing”. You gather up a few buckets, dust the inside with talcum powder or corn starch (to keep the ants in), and on a cool morning dig quickly into the mound, dumping shovels full of dirt into your buckets. Dig deep enough to find the bottom of the mound. Add a generous squirt of dish soap to each bucket, and add water to drown the ants. This works on small mounds, but not on old, deep colonies.

Organic-approved products for killing fire ants typically contain either d-Limonene (from orange oil) or a spinosad compound (from special bacteria) as their active ingredients.

One organic produce that contains d-Limonene, to be used as a drench, is Orange Guard Fire Ant Control. The d-Limonene products have worked pretty well in our area community gardens.

An organic product for fire ant control that uses spinosad as the active ingredient is Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew by Bonide. Instructions for using it as a mound drench are pretty far down the label, but they are there.

Whatever product you choose, be sure to follow package directions carefully.

Remember to NOT disturb a mound in any way before using a product on or around the mound. If the ants are disturbed, they go into “defense mode”; a whole lot of ants will boil up out of the mound where they can’t be reached by a drench.

Fire ants are not easy to eradicate, and new colonies will continue to move in from surrounding areas if they can, even when old colonies are killed off. It is their way.

However, gardeners can be persistent, too. Knowing the best times to work on the mounds for best effect helps keep our gardens fire-ant free.

For more information and the recipe for a DIY orange-oil-based soil drench, see Fire Ants in the Garden, Part 2.

Can I Grow Food Organically on a Sand Dune?

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This past summer, I was told by a farmer at a local farmer’s market that growing food organically is impossible here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. However, I have found that to be not precisely true.

What is true is that my organically-managed garden is supplying a small but steady flow of veggies to the kitchen. What is also true is that a lot of those veggies have been eggplants and okra. As long as I love eggplants and okra, my summer veggie garden will be a smashing success. Ditto for radishes in the spring and fall.

Gulf coast early fall harvest of okra, peppers, greens, and one winter radish.

Unlike market farmers, home gardeners like me have the benefit of not needing to compete with the produce section of the local supermarket. We don’t expect our gardens to supply all the standard veggies the whole year round. This means we can focus our efforts on crops that don’t need chemical interventions to produce food in our yards.

It can also help if a gardener is a bit flexible in how to measure success in the garden.

Part of the path to success is identifying which exact crops will produce well in our gardens, then growing and appreciating those crops. Another part of the path is to keep in mind the part of the Serenity Prayer that reminds us to not get too fussed about the “things I cannot change” and focusing instead on knowing which things can be changed and which can’t.

My sand-dune-based garden

This Gulf Coast sand dune, 28 feet above sea level in plant hardiness zone 9a, is very different from the location of my previous 30 years of gardening in the red clay of the Georgia Piedmont region in hardiness zone 7b. In the “things that cannot be changed” category, the soil here is, as mentioned already, mostly sand. I can pile compost on top of it, but I cannot change the basic sandiness of the yard. I also cannot add more cold to our winters, which means some plants that need a lot of cold, like Rhubarb and many varieties of apples, will not thrive here. The flip side of that is that now I can grow some sub-tropical fruits.

Radishes pulled from the garden, with leaves still attached. Some radishes are round and red, some round and purple, some long and red.
November radishes, three kinds.

Many crops are more adaptable than Rhubarb and cold-loving fruits, especially the annuals that I usually grow in the garden. In our move from Georgia last spring, I brought seed packets for some of those crops left over from the past couple of years. Some of those crop varieties have worked well, and some haven’t.

I’ve already noted that eggplants, okra, and radishes have been wildly productive here. However, a whole lot of crops have been less happy here on my sand dune.

A sadness of beans

Bean crops, which always totally rocked the garden in north Georgia, have not done well here. The first planting gave us a few handfuls of beans, not the usual superabundance, before they died, and I was puzzled, but planted more. When the next planting died, I had to start thinking harder about what could be wrong. English peas planted in early fall met the same fate as the second sad planting of beans. They just faded away.

I can see a few possible reasons for the problem. One is a lack of some essential nutrient, and another is a high soluble salt content in the soil. Until I can deliver a soil sample to the state testing lab, those are both just guesses.

A third possible reason is the relatively high pH of my sandy soil, which is way above 7. Beans tend to prefer a lower pH. This year, as I prepare the planting beds, I will be digging in some sulfur to start bringing that down (sulfur can take years to have any effect). In addition, I hope to hunt up some gypsum to use for a calcium source, since that can also help alleviate the high pH — and it might help with the soluble salts, too.

There is a good chance that I can change the soil pH a little bit, and I can amend the soil to bring in missing nutrients. I might not be able to do much about soluble salts, since my garden is only five blocks from the beach. Salt is in the air! If salts are the problem, beans may never do well here. It will be interesting to find out.

Every crop turns a bit yellow as it grows

As my summer crops grew this year, I saw that they all became less richly green over time. Back in north Georgia, a little bit of Epsom salts (an affiliate link to the product), a source of soluble magnesium, would fix that when extra nitrogen (like in a fish-based fertilizer — see article at this link) didn’t seem to help.

I discovered that Epsom salts works here, too, but they need to be applied much more frequently. The sandy “soil” lets dissolved nutrients, like the magnesium in Epsom salts, wash away, down out of the root zone, very quickly. Clay soils, like those in north Georgia, hold on to nutrients much more tightly, keeping them up in the root zone longer.

This summer, I ended up needing to apply a weak solution of Epsom salts (two rounded tablespoons dissolved in two gallons of water, then applied as evenly as I could manage over two 3×12 foot beds) every couple of weeks to keep the plants looking healthy. For my fall crops, this schedule stretched out to 3-to-4 weeks.

One item on my “to purchase” list this spring is a big bag of a crushed-rock-magnesium source that will not wash down through the sand so quickly. Big, gravel-sized chunks are my preference, but more finely pulverized products are easier to find. I am considering Sul-Po-Mag and Azomite (two affiliate links) as possible sources.

With some additional research into sources and work in applying what I’ve found to the garden, there is a good chance that I can fix the low-magnesium problem.

Other crops that grew less well than preferred

My corn patch was a bust. We ended up with a few patchy ears of sweet corn, which was a disappointment. I think the cause was a mineral-nutrient deficiency problem. I plan to try again this coming year after amending the soil more intensively (I had added a lot of purchased compost this past spring.)

Zucchini squash was very productive for a very short time, then was killed off by squash vine borers. The winter squash did not do well at all. I had planted a butternut, which can withstand the borers, but the squashes that the plants produced were tiny. Then, the leaves all got mildewed and the plants died. For winter squashes, I will — again — keep working to improve the soil with composts and mineral amendments and also try some different varieties. I know that ‘Seminole’ pumpkin squash should do well here, but I am hoping for something thicker-fleshed, sweeter, and with a shell that won’t require a sledgehammer to break through (I have grown it before…).

Sweet potatoes were not nearly as productive as I would have preferred. The good news is that I did dig up about 20 pounds of sweets from the garden. My experience in north Georgia, though, shows me that a much larger harvest is possible from the number of plants grown. From similar space and number of plants in Georgia, the harvest was typically twice that amount.

Tomatoes from the fall plants, brought inside in late November.

Tomatoes in the spring were not very productive. A couple of plants just plain died (drowned, when the garden flooded) and the rest quit making fruit in mid-summer. Apparently, that is a normal occurrence here, caused by nighttime high temperatures. The late-summer tomatoes that I grew were only just beginning to ripen before our first frost on the last night of November.

These tomato issues can be fixed (I hope) with changes in the timing of my plantings. Luckily, this year I am already here, and the garden beds are dug, so I should be able to get tomato plants into the ground well before April. (Our last frost should be around the end of February.) Last year, I was just starting to prepare the garden beds in April, because we moved here at the end of March.

Beets have been a bust. I planted one set of seeds in the late summer, and they came up, but then the little plants faded away. A second planting produced more little plants, and most of them are still present, but they have not grown much.

Stink bugs! Caterpillars!

In addition to soil problems, there were some pests. This is not really a surprise, since tiny plant-eaters are everywhere. My two largest categories of pests were stink bugs and their relatives, and caterpillars of several species.

Immature leaf-footed bugs, the nymph stage, on Southern peas.

Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs damaged tomatoes, peppers, and the Southern peas. Most evenings beginning in early summer, I spent a few minutes out in the garden with a large plastic cup of soapy water, hunting for these pests. A whole platoon of immature leaf-footed bugs could be dislodged into “the cup of doom”, where they would drown, with one shake of the bean, leaf, tomato, or pepper on which they were gathered.

Caterpillars plagued the garden until late summer. Every leafy green vegetable that is normally recommended for the summer garden was attacked, in addition to tomatoes and peppers. Weirdly, though, the caterpillars that I expected to see on cabbage-family plants in fall never appeared. My kale, collards, and arugula have been unmolested. I count this as a blessing.

Fire ants

Fire ant mounds were all over the yard when we moved in. It took awhile for me to get around to dealing with them, but I did find that the Texas A&M recipe, noted in my second article on fire ants, that uses Medina Orange Oil (affiliate link) and Blue Dawn dish soap works great here. Smaller mounds were destroyed with one treatment. Larger mounds took two or three tries. As new colonies have moved in, I have continued using the DIY recipe. This recipe is not strictly organic, considering the range of ingredients in the Blue Dawn dish soap. When my giant bottle of Blue Dawn is finally empty, I plan to try using liquid castile soap, which does not include the petrochemical ingredients, as a replacement for the dish soap.

Before I started seriously hunting down and destroying the fire ant colonies, the ants were eating okra in the garden. It was a surprise that the ants on the okra really were fire ants, not like the kind of ants back in Georgia that farmed aphids on the okra. Figuring this out was painful. Welts from fire ant bites/stings take a long time to heal.

Some happier crops

Plenty of crops have done pretty well in my sand dune garden. Here are some happy pictures of examples:

  • Zinnias and butterflies
  • Tobasco peppers, fresh and dried
  • Chicories and carrots
  • Winter radishes, a favorite
  • The arugula patch
  • Sunflower and native bees
Successes!

The plan for now

One great feature of this garden is that digging holes and creating new planting beds is much easier than in the clay in north Georgia. Even better, wet sand never sticks to the shovel in huge messy globs like the red clay can. However, the big drawback is that the sand doesn’t hold onto much of anything. Water and nutrients — like from fertilizers — wash right through.

To improve this situation, I will keep adding composts — my own compost pile is far enough along to reduce the amount I need to buy this year. In addition, I will be buying those crushed rock sources of nutrients, to improve the health and productivity of my crops, as noted above. These additions should make organic gardening in the sand more successful.

In future posts (I promise, they will be more frequent in the coming year), there will be more information about the actual plants in the garden.

I hope that your gardening has provided good food through 2020, and that the coming year brings more garden adventures and successes! Keep well.

When Things Go Wrong in the Garden

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Our new garden on the Mississippi Gulf Coast already is providing plenty of food and education. So far, besides the early spring radishes, we have harvested ripe cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers, about a dozen zucchini, and several small bunches of green beans.

In addition, we have harvested a few gallons of wild dewberries not far from the house, and I have identified several other wild edible plants in our yard and neighborhood.

This all sounds amazing, right? Like we have moved to a land of abundance.

  • Zucchini
  • Early green beans
Swiss chard and Chinese Multicolored Spinach plants growing in the garden. Sticks standing around the plants deter squirrels from digging nearby.

Challenges in our Gulf Coast garden

Let me just list, though, some of the challenges facing the garden (and gardener!) in this yard, starting with zoological forms:

  • Fire ants — many, many colonies — which will take awhile to discourage. I have plans, though, based on my organic fire ant control articles, part 1 and part 2.
  • Moles, which have tunneled through the garden, damaging roots and making it impossible for some plants — the ones with tunnels right underneath — to develop deep root systems.
  • Squirrels, which dig random holes in the garden and uproot smaller plants as they dig.

In addition, other insect pests and the first diseases have already attacked. First, caterpillars destroyed the Swiss chard (Just like in Georgia!). When I finally pulled up the chard to replant that space with another kind of crop, the caterpillars moved to the tomato plants.

It took days and days of spraying the plants with an organic-approved Bt product for caterpillars (Thuricide) and hand-smashing the larger caterpillars to stop the infestation. I think that I finally got them all, but would not be surprised to find a couple more.

  • Powdery mildew on zucchini leaves
  • Evidence of pickleworms, hiding in the cuke

Then, the zucchini leaves got covered up in mildew. The cucumbers have been attacked by pickleworms, and then we had a tropical storm.

Backyard and garden flooded by rains from tropical storm Cristobal.
The vegetable garden completely flooded in Tropical Storm Cristobal

The storm waters have receded, but the ground stayed saturated for several days. Not all plants in the garden will recover from having their roots under water for so long. The okra looks fine, but the tomato plants are still wilted, the green bean plants are turning brown, and the rosemary (not surprisingly) is totally brown.

How does an organic gardener address these many challenges?

It helps if a gardener has a good sense of humor, a lot of patience, and a readiness to observe, experiment, and learn.

To reduce risks of flooding

We had placed the garden in the highest part of the back yard that gets full sun, but that was not high enough. For this particular garden, an obvious place to start addressing our challenges is in building raised beds, to keep the garden from drowning in future storms.

Considering where we live, future heavy-rains are a certainty. Raised beds would allow the garden to drain faster, even if it goes underwater again.

Raised beds might also reduce some of our mole-tunneling issues.

We didn’t start with raised beds, partly because we wanted to get things planted right away, but also because of the fire ants. I had observed in Georgia that fire ants seem to be attracted to raised beds. However, an underwater garden is worse than dealing with ants. Raised beds are definitely in our future.

How to address other garden challenges:

For other critter issues, bugs, and diseases, reaching for “products” is not, usually, my first choice. An exception is when I am caught totally off guard — for example, by unexpected rampaging herds of caterpillars.

Instead, these are strategies that I use:

  • Try different planting dates, to avoid the pest or disease that is causing problems. In Georgia, planting bush beans as early as the weather would allow meant I could harvest more beans before the bean beetles attacked the plants.
  • Try a different variety of the crop. Birds and other wildlife can be confused by varieties of crops that ripen to an unexpected color (when “ripe” is white or green instead of red, for example). Also, some varieties of cucumbers and squashes can stand up to mildew diseases longer than others, before dying. In addition, it is possible to find varieties of most crops that ripen sooner/faster than others, so gardeners can harvest more before an expected disaster strikes.
  • Switch to completely different crops. Some crops might be inappropriate for a particular garden. If the only way to harvest from the crop is to provide constant application of sprays/powders, that could be a clue that it is time to try other crops. Learning to love a different crop that is better suited to your yard is a strategy to try. (Note: I did not used to even LIKE beets, but now they are a favorite.)
  • Expect and be satisfied with a short harvest window for a crop. My zucchini plants produced veggies for about three weeks. Now the plants are done, partly due to mildew and partly to being underwater, and I can use that space for another crop. Even though I would love to have more zucchini from the garden, the ending of the crop is not a disaster. Instead, it is an opportunity to plant another crop. Maybe sunflowers…

Strategies in action for this current garden

We won’t have time to put in raised beds until fall. The house we moved into has had a lot of updates, but it was built in 1948. There are things that need to be done.

Today, for example, we crawled under the house (18 inch clearance) and pulled out the dead animal that has created an awful smell and attracted about a million flies over the past couple of days — it was a possum.

However, we have considered some different options for raised beds, checked prices of supplies at the local hardware/lumber stores, and figured out how much of each supply we will need, when the time comes.

For changing the timing of planting — this is our first season of planting in this garden. I have recorded planting dates and crop notes in my copy of the Garden Planner and Notebook, so that next year I will know which crops — such as zucchini, cucumbers, Swiss chard, and green beans — I should try planting earlier. Because I have kept notes, I will be able to compare results from the different planting times.

For switching out to different crops — I already have switched out the Swiss chard to something completely different. Peanuts are growing in that space, and the plants withstood the flooding like little champs. The seed packet is leftover from 2013 (!!!). I don’t really know why I kept the packet, because it took up a lot of space in my seed box. Glad I did, though. The seeds all came up.

I am still looking for edible greens that can withstand the heat, humidity, caterpillars, and other hazards of a Southeastern US summer. I have tried Malabar spinach in the past, in Georgia, and it does well, but I have been unable to love it.

My parsley is still too small to provide greens for the kitchen, and so is the purslane. I might try Good King Henry next, even though it is related to Swiss chard. Maybe as a “wilder” type of plant, it will not be as attractive to caterpillars.

Ripe red tomatoes, green tomatoes, smaller cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, and small butternut squashes all harvested from the garden, set on a tray indoors.
The good news — harvested from our garden. Green tomatoes are from wilted plants.

To address the challenge of a short harvest window, the best move might be to just plant LOADS of whichever crop is going to have only a few weeks of productivity. Even if the garden is small. Then when the crop comes in, it will be glorious, for just that short time.

This is the strategy I will likely try for Swiss chard next year. In addition to planting it earlier, I will plant more seeds closer together and harvest them smaller. At the first sign of trouble, I will harvest the whole crop to bring into the kitchen. We can luxuriate in the Swiss chard for awhile, then move on to another crop.

Organic Garden Information

Resources to support your organic garden.

What is organic gardening?  Organic gardeners support the health of their plants by creating and maintaining a living soil that contains a diverse community of underground micro-organisms and other tiny life forms.  Spraying “products” to control pests and diseases is the last option for solving garden problems, even if an organic-approved product is available.

Fertilizers in an organic garden consist mostly of ground-up tissues (seed meals, kelp meal, for example) and rock powders. Nutrients from these are made available to plants through the action of those micro-organisms — bacteria, funguses, actinomycetes, and more — that live in the soil.

Managing an organic garden can be a wonderful experience, but here in the Southern U.S. there can also be a bit of a learning curve. The eventual goal of this website is to flatten that curve, providing information that can help you create a vibrant, productive garden.

If there is a resource or information you need, let me know by sending a note through the Contact page so I can put your topic at the top of the list of resources to create.

Cluster of round, red radishes -- an easy crop and so good to eat.
Radishes from my organic garden.
An embarrassment of riches from my pepper-patch.
An embarrassment of riches from my pepper-patch.

Organic gardens, even small ones, produce good food for people. They also can support populations of  insects and animals that are an essential part a healthy ecosystem.

Bronze Arrow lettuce in the garden
Bronze Arrow - a beautiful oakleaf-type lettuce
cluster of small green tomatoes
New, tiny tomatoes growing in a cluster in Amy's organic garden

Good Garden Soil

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Small farm with red clay soil in north Georgia produces a lot of good food.

Several gardening books I’ve read include the note that good garden soil is a sandy loam, rich in organic matter. My yard’s soil is naturally a massive gob of red clay — like in the nearby photo — not at all what is recommended.

Red clay is actually not all bad. It holds nutrients much better than sandy soil, so it doesn’t need as much fertilizer. It also holds water — sometimes too well! — which means it is slow to dry out. When it does get dry, it becomes brick-hard and tough to dig.

Plants benefit from the nutrient-holding and water-holding capacity of clay soil. The problem is that the clay compacts and does not allow roots to move easily through the soil, and it doesn’t have good air spaces (which roots need).

Not every yard in this area has such dense red clay as mine. When we first moved here (in 1990), and for years afterward, an older gentleman in Kennesaw grew roses, lots and lots of roses, out near the road on Cherokee Street.

I stopped to talk with him once, when I saw him out tending his roses. He said that a friend brought him a truckload of oak leaves to use for mulch each year, but that his yard had naturally good soil. That comment stunned me into speechlessness for a moment — my experience was so different!

Most people I talk to around here have soil like mine. This may be why so many new gardeners use raised beds filled with soil mixes that don’t include clay.

My gardens, though, are not in raised beds. They are in the ground, in that red clay. I add amendments like compost (from my yard) and soil conditioner (from a garden center) to increase the organic matter and microbial activity. The amendments make the clay soil a more welcoming place for the roots of my crops.

How to create good garden soil from red clay

Tumbling type compost bin

A recommendation from Cooperative Extension’s “Ask an Expert” page for improving clay soil, is below. The picture of the compost bin nearby, though, is a clue about at least one important amendment.

Here is the Extension Expert’s recommendation:

  • Choose an organic soil amendment like composted yard waste, rotten leaves, or well-rotted manure (make sure any composted manure does not contain residual herbicides!). Material that is well-rotted will not smell unpleasant; it will smell like the earth.
  • Spread a 3 to 4 inch layer of your chosen amendment on top of the clay soil; work it down into the soil about 6 to 8 inches.
  • After the compost has been worked into the soil, you can spread an inch or two layer of sand on top and gently spade it in.
  • Before planting in spring, lay on another 2-3 inch layer of compost and work it into the soil, about 6 to 8 inches down (the depth of a shovel blade).

Walter Reeves, The Georgia Gardener, has an updated article on Soil – Bed Preparation that suggests bagged soil conditioner as an alternate for compost. His article also suggests adding Permatil to the mix, to keep the clay soil looser, as the composts and soil conditioner decompose and disappear.

Permatil is expanded shale, and it creates air spaces in the soil. I have added a similar product to part of my upper garden, an area I don’t re-amend as often as the veggie area because it has some perennials (permanent plants).

If you can’t find Permatil but are interested in trying something similar, look for Espoma’s Soil Perfecter, bits of kiln-fired “ceramic mineral” that works in a similar way to open up air spaces in the soil.

Nutrients and pH?

The Extension recommendation above does not address soil pH (acid level) or fertility/nutrients. The Expert who answered the question may have assumed that everyone will know to send a soil sample to their state’s soil lab (Georgia’s is at UGA, in Athens) through their local Cooperative Extension office.

If you are not sending a soil sample to your state’s soil lab, consider buying a pH test kit (see my article on Soil pH and Garden Success for more information). For fertility, if you don’t have a soil lab recommendation for fertilizer, choose an organic-approved garden fertilizer and follow the package directions. To learn more about nutrient sources for your garden, check out my articles on Potassium Sources for an Organic Garden and on Fish Emulsion Fertilizers.

Dig soil when ground is not soggy

You will know your clay soil is dry enough for digging when you can squeeze a handful of it and it breaks up into bits. You should not be able to roll it into the kind of snake-shapes that can be coiled to make pottery bowls.

Clay soil needs to be not-soggy at digging time, partly so you can get the clay to let go of your shovel and partly so it won’t reform into giant, brick-like clods when the lumps finally dry. Digging in wet clay soil also causes it to compact, making it lose the air spaces that are vital to healthy plant roots.

Winter is a great time to work on improving garden soil or to create new planting beds. Here in the South, we have some pleasantly cool afternoons mixed in with the cold ones, which means we have good opportunities for working outdoors.

Right now, though, the ground is squishy under my feet when I walk in the yard. I just need to wait for the rain to stop and the ground to get drier.

Soil pH and Garden Success

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When a garden hasn’t been doing well, one of the first conditions to check is the soil’s pH, its acid-alkaline balance. The pH scale goes from 0 to 14;  7 is the neutral pH, measurements below 7 are acidic, and measurements above 7 are alkaline.

For reference, distilled salad vinegar has a pH in the range of 2 to 2.5 (acidic), and cold-process soap has a pH in the range of 9 to 10 (alkaline).

Soil pH influences how well plants can take in nutrients from the soil, so getting a garden’s soil into the best pH range for your plants will help them be healthier and more productive.

What is less well-known is that correcting a pH that is either too high or too low takes time. Testing soil pH should be done now, or soon, for gardens that have not done well in the past year.

What pH is good for gardens?

Blueberries will be ripe beginning in mid-to-late June.
Blueberry plants prefer a soil pH near 5.

Most garden veggies need a soil pH of between 6 and 7. Where I live, northwest of Atlanta, the natural soil pH is lower than that range — it is naturally acidic. With that acidity in mind, many people here routinely add lime to their lawns and gardens without checking the soil pH first, and end up with a soil pH that is too high.

When I worked at the local Extension office and managed the soil samples that went to the soil lab at University of Georgia (UGA), it was not unusual to see some samples with soil pH around 5, but others with pH higher than 8. Those higher pH soil samples were from lawns and gardens that had been limed pretty much every year.

Once, a friend who decided to plant blueberries in the space where she had originally kept a vegetable garden sent a soil sample in to the lab at UGA. The lab found that the pH of her soil was 7. This pH level was not a surprise because she had been spreading ashes from her fireplace on the garden. Wood ashes are a good source of potassium, but they raise the soil pH.

For many veggies, a soil pH of 7 is fine, but the blueberries she hoped to plant in that space prefer a pH closer to 5. That soil needed some work before it would make a good home for blueberries. 

How can I find the pH of my garden soil?

Example of easy to use soil pH test kit for home gardeners.
Example of easy to use soil pH test kit for home gardeners.

The most reliable method of finding your garden’s soil pH is to send a soil sample to your state’s soil lab. Call your local county Cooperative Extension office to find out how to take a representative soil sample, how to package it, and the lab fee for this service.

Another option is to purchase a pH test kit at a local garden center. One I have used (pictured nearby) includes a container with color chart for comparison, capsules of pH-indicator-powder to add to the container, and instructions.

The basic instructions for this kit, and others:

  1. put a tiny bit of garden soil into the container
  2. add the indicator powder
  3. add water up to a line near the top
  4. put the lid back on the container, then
  5. mix the parts together by shaking the container until color develops.

You find the pH by comparing the color of your sample to the chart on the front of the container.

Soil sample in pH test kit with water and indicator powder, to read the soil pH.
Sample in pH test kit shows pH of soil in my upper flower bed to be about 6.5.

How to lower a too-high soil pH

The UGA soil lab sent information to my friend about how much aluminum sulfate (the cheapest option) to add in order to bring the pH down to a better level for blueberries. If you know that the pH of your garden soil is too high, but don’t have a lab-recommendation for how to lower it, the amount of elemental sulfur (my preferred option) needed can also be found in a table by Clemson University Extension, in its Changing the pH of your soil publication.

For a soil pH that is only slightly high (about 0.5 higher than the desired level for your plants), one of my county’s former Extension agents used to recommend mixing sphagnum peat into the soil as a quick fix. Iowa State University Extension suggests other amendments that can lower a too-high pH, including “elemental sulfur, aluminum sulfate, iron sulfate, acidifying nitrogen, and organic mulches.”

There is a note, too, that a very high pH (over 8) is hard to bring down. When the local Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden (one of my volunteer groups/projects) was at a location that had a high-pH soil, we added the recommended amount of sulfur several years in a row before the pH started to come down.

How to raise a too-low soil pH

The Iowa State University publication How to change your soil’s pH includes a table showing how much ground limestone will be needed to raise soil pH. If you have hydrated lime handy, and think it might be a “quicker fix” for a too-low pH, please don’t try it. The risk of raising the pH too high with this product, by accident, is large. Lowering the pH after over-liming is difficult and can take a long time. Use ground limestone instead of quick lime or hydrated lime.

It takes more lime to raise pH in a clay soil than in a sandy soil. In general, according to the table in the Iowa State publication, for 100 square feet of clay-soil garden, it takes 5 to 6 pounds of limestone mixed into the top six inches of soil to raise the pH by 0.5.

When is the best time to adjust the soil pH?

For my friend’s blueberries, the UGA lab report recommended that the bushes shouldn’t be planted until 6 months after applying the sulfur. If she added the sulfur in October, that means blueberry-planting should — for best effect —  wait until April. That is pushing the boundary for good planting time for woody plants like blueberries; as spring progresses and the weather warms, newly planted bushes are less likely to do well. They need time in the soil for their root systems to become established before being stressed by the heat of a Georgia summer.

What this means is that soil testing should be done now, if it hasn’t already been done, so adjustments to pH can be made soon enough to benefit plants that will be planted in spring. 

Broccoli, a cool-season crop, does best when soil pH is 6.5 to 7.

What soil pH is best for my plants?

An article by Lewis Hill, published in Robert Rodale’s The Best Gardening Ideas I Know (1983) includes a list of some garden plants and the pH ranges they prefer. I’ve pulled some of the food plants from his list to post here:

  • pH 4 to 5: blueberry
  • pH 5 to 5.75: blackberry, grape, parsnip, plum, potato, pumpkin
  • pH 5.75 to 6.5: bean, citrus fruits, cowpeas, currants, gooseberry, oats, pepper, rutabaga, rye, squash, strawberry, tomato, turnip
  • pH 6.5 to 7: apple, beet, broccoli, buckwheat, butternut, chicory, chives, cucumber, eggplant, endive, kale, leek, muskmelon, onion, pea, peach, radish, raspberry, rhubarb, spinach, watermelon, wheat
  • pH 7 to 7.5: alfalfa, asparagus, barley, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, nasturtium, parsley

This list may help other gardeners in planning what to plant where, but it is comforting to remember that plants will still grow and produce in soil that is slightly outside their preferred pH range.

This is lucky, since most of us grow many of these plants mixed all together in our gardens. However, for peak production, planting in soil that is actually the preferred pH for each crop works best.

Succession planting with preferred pH for each crop in mind

When I plant Irish-type potatoes in the spring, I will have added some sphagnum peat to their soil to bring the pH down a bit, but not all the way down to 5. Knowing the pH preferences of other crops helps me know what to plant after the potatoes in that space. For example, cabbages in that space would likely be a total bust, because their pH preference is so much higher (7 to 7.5!).

After  potatoes are harvested, a better option than cabbages would be to let a nearby vining crop, like melons, sprawl across that space. Another option would be to plant a crop there that prefers a lower pH range, like beans or cowpeas that thrive at pH 5.75-6.5.

 

(If this information seems helpful or interesting, please remember to “like” or “share” it. Thank you!)

Drought, but the Garden Keeps Growing

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Do you ever have one of those years when your life is undergoing a huge change? That year is the one I’m having. One side effect is that I haven’t been keeping the blog updated. Another is that I have been making my garden smaller, to better match the time I have to tend it.

Considering the amount of water that I would need to be applying to the garden at its former size, this has turned out to be a good year for making such a change.

The last real rain at my house fell during the weekend of September 17-18. I was outside a lot that weekend, and I got totally soaked. All of us here, just north of Atlanta, are longing for another rain like that!

Now, outside, we are all covered up in smoke blowing in from forest fires in north Georgia and southern Tennessee, where many thousands of acres are burning out of control.

Park’s Whopper tomato plant at the end of September. PHOTO/Amy

At home, though, the garden space I have been tending has done really well. To be honest, it was a great year for tomatoes in my yard, partly due to my having planted Park’s Whopper Improved tomatoes.

When I finally pulled out that last plant in mid-October, I had to bring out an extra basket to carry in all the red, pink, and green fruits that were still on it.

The garden now has a couple of jalepeno plants that look pretty festive with all the red peppers. It also has some bok choy, kale, winter radishes (a family favorite!), the usual assortment of herbs, and the recently-planted garlic and shallots.The list is a little bit lean, but we will enjoy every bit of what we bring in.

Hope that all the other gardens out there are doing well!

Garden Update

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The usual abundance of the summer garden is finally kicking in:

Straight Nine cucumbers; yellow, red, and black tomatoes; assorted peppers.  PHOTO/Amy W.
Chanterelle mushrooms.      PHOTO/Amy W.

The harvests aren’t wildly varied right now, but that will change as the summer rolls on. The cucumbers are doing especially well. I don’t know how long that will last, though, because the first vine up already has some interesting angular lesions on its leaves. That is not a good sign. However, Joe started a crock of brined pickles today, and I loaded the dehydrator with tomatoes and peppers. Things are looking up!

The woods have been a source of abundance, too. We’ve eaten chanterelle mushrooms with a few meals in the past week or so, and a lot were dried (have I said lately how much we love our dehydrator?) for later use.

Out in the neighborhood, the Cobb County Water department has been working on the water lines. We have a new fire hydrant in the Northwest corner of our yard, which is definitely good, but we also have a bit of a mess up by the curb. When we found out about the plan to replace our pipes, I delayed planting some of the crops that had been slated for the beds nearest the road.

Cucumber on a still-healthy vine.     PHOTO/Amy W.

The workmen did a great job of avoiding my gardens, even though they technically encroach into the easement, and I decided last week that it was probably safe to plant those spaces.

It is too late for the peanuts, so those will have to wait until next year. It is probably too late for the sorghum, too, but I planted some anyway. There were a lot more seeds in that packet than in the peanut packet, so it seemed like a safer gamble.

I also planted some bush beans. There is still plenty of time for those!  There is a plan to put a couple of tomato plants where the first bush beans came out (those pesky Bean Beetles did a lot of damage!), but the weekend has been very busy, and that isn’t done yet.

In a weird bit of good news, I have a bad habit of tossing tomatoes affected by things like chipmunk bites and blossom end rot into the shrubbery by the creek.

Poblano peppers.       PHOTO/Amy W.

A couple of tomato plants have come up over there, and they both already have a few flowers. I have no idea what kind they are, but I will be digging them up one evening this week to transplant into the garden.

Meanwhile, I am expecting the zucchini plants to expire soon (due to Squash Vine Borers), and when they do, I will be planting buckwheat as a short-term cover crop in that space. In mid-August, when it is time to start putting out the fall crops, I’ll turn the buckwheat into the soil and plant carrots in that bed.

I hope that all the other gardens out there are enjoying our break from the rains and doing well!

Transplant without Trauma

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My friend pictured below, Mr. Collins, knows I’m nuts about gardening, and he brought another of his really great ideas into the office to show me what he’d worked out.  He grows plants from seeds to transplant into his garden, but he had been having trouble with the loose potting mix he was using.

When he moved the plants from the pots to the garden, the loose mix would fall away from the rootball, resulting in some damage to the root system. This happened often enough that he spent some time thinking about ways to get around that problem. He wanted to “Transplant without Trauma.”

He actually was working with more than one idea. The one that seemed most successful was lining the pot with an old mesh produce bag. After fitting the bag into place, he adds the potting mix and baby plant. When it’s time to move the plant into the garden, he just lifts the whole shebang out of the pot by the edge of the mesh that is sticking out of the pot and plants it, mesh bag and all. The roots grow through the mesh with no trouble. The planting mix doesn’t shift, and the roots remain undisturbed.

Another idea had been to put an old jar lid – that has a big spikey nail sticking up higher than the sides of the pot – into the bottom of the pot before adding the potting medium and baby plant. The theory had been that he would just have to pull the spikey nail up and the plant would come with it, but on its own this wasn’t enough to hold the soil together. However, combined with a mesh bag, it works as a ‘helper” mechanism.

Another very simple tool that he brought was the blue lid in the photo above. He made the cut-away portion large enough to fit easily around the stem of the plant he needed to remove from its pot – the slit in the rim is designed to open up the space to wrap this around the stem. When the blue lid is in place, right against the soil, the pot is turned upside down to pop the plant out. The blue lid holds the soil and plant together better than when he does this the usual way – with just his hand across the top of the pot. The lid stops the jolting fall of the soil/root mass into his hand.

It was really great of Mr. Collins to stop by with his ideas. I am sure I am not the only person who has a stash of those mesh bags waiting to be re-purposed. Usually, I scrunch/knot them up to use as scrubbies in the kitchen, but they are very long lasting, and I have a pile of spares.

Out in my garden now, I have some broccoli that experienced the traumatic version of transplanting, because I bought the plant babies in a nine-pack from a garden-supply store. The good news is that it all seems to have recovered well enough.

Ditto for the cabbages and the cauliflower. I think, though, that if I had been growing my own from seed, and if I were starting them a little late (not an unusual occurance), that I would want to find a way to reduce trauma to the plants so they would be more likely to experience less of a slow-down in their growth. I think I will be looking around for some more mesh bags to keep on hand, just in case.


In places other than my yard, pecans have been dropping to the ground. I hope I’m not the only person who finds herself at the end of the day with a pocketfull of pecans that have been picked up on, say, a noon walk.

I’ve been picking up a half-dozen or so most days, and even though there are barely enough for a pie at this point, I am looking forward to a peaceful few evenings of cracking pecans by the fireplace later in the winter.

There’s not much to complain about  these days – I have family, friends, pets, an un-smashed house, an interesting job, pecans making lumps in my pocket, good food growing out in the yard, and more. I plan to spend the next several days being extra-thankful.

I hope that you all have a great Thanksgiving!