Recent content by LTCM

Your soil should never be bare. If there aren't any plants growing you should have it covered in mulch. French vineyards are a different topic because they grow, purposefully, in bad soil. That helps control yields, maintains stress, and concentrate flavors. Their soil is basicly gravel in...

If you have the room, might as well try to root some of what you trim off. Put them over a heat mat and you should have hood results.

  Think of all the free nitrogen.

  If I recall correctly, official temps are always taken at something like four feet above ground level in the shade.  So if the official temp is 100 degrees, your plants, at ground level above gravel, are experiencing temps higher than that.   I've been in my attic at 140...it's like being...

Looks like herbicide damage to me.  I used horse manure on my tomatoes one year and the residual 2,4D caused exactly that kind of damage.  

  That's a common misconception.  Only elemental sulfur will raise soil ph to any meaningful degree.  While I'm sure some products with sulfates in them will lower ph, it's not because of the sulfates.   Once you add elemental sulfur to the soil, it goes through some chemical reactions to turn...

Dude, you are officially my new favorite person.  That is friggin awesome.   But I bet those black pipes get HOTTTTTT.  Do you happen to know what the water temp is when you first start watering?

Sucks man. Sorry to hear it. Don't throw them out. Some of those plants will live. Big time set back but a plant's desire to grow is insanely strong.

I have not listened to the podcast, but I have researched compost tea, including Elaine's methods, and she does a great job.  I'm always amazed at how many people I see doing compost teas wrong.  They literally are flooding the system with sugars which creates a bacteria imbalance.  Don't forget...

Given that ph uses a logarithmic scale with base 10, a ph of 9 is increabibly high compared to 6.5 to 6.8. We're talking over 150 times the number of free H ions at a ph of 6.8.

Don't mulch it. You won't get rid of poison ivy by by covering it. It stores up too much energy in the roots and will spread under the mulch before reappearing everywhere. I've only found two ways of handling PI. Triclopyr and pulling it. Probably too late in the year to spray Triclopyr as...

Nice and flat too. Gonna be a good little garden.

Wow, lots of hate here.  Class A bio-solids are perfectly safe when compared to the vast majority of other organic ferts.   Surprised no one has brought up prions yet.  I thought all good hippies knew about that one.

Could also be that your white hab seeds carried the damping off pathogen. Not unheard of for seed stock to be infected. It's a hard disease to fight once it's in your mix, so it is key to eliminate the pathogen before sowing. My methods of combating it would get me attacked by a certain...

Damping off. Past the point of no return. Start over with new mix.