I will be 80 before the garden season is over this year. I was raised on a farm. By the time I was 16, along with my upbringing, which included my father farming with horses, I had completed 3 years of high school agriculture, I had competed in knowledge competition in crops, poultry, dairy products and had even gone to Internations competition for soil judging. I could keep on as my experiences continued with ‘farming with the Amish’, organic experiences, and produce markets, but the point I want to make is that even though I can list lots of exposure to agriculture, until recently I really didn’t know anything about soil and how it relates to crop growth. I am still learning!
A definition of soil from Soil Taxonomy, second edition.
“soil - Soil is a natural body comprised of solids (minerals and organic matter), liquid, and gases that occurs on the land surface, occupies space, and is characterized by one or both of the following: horizons, or layers, that are distinguishable from the initial material as a result of additions, losses, transfers, and transformations of energy and matter or the ability to support rooted plants in a natural environment.” and if we include clay, it is just soil reduced to very fine particles.
I recently wrote a story called “Herbicide drift on my Garden!” and in that article, I discussed how I was fighting the effect on my garden. I had mentioned that my tomatoes had performed poorly and attributed it to the herbicides that drifted onto my garden. Since that article, I felt that I must adjust my thinking on the tomatoes. They were planted in containers with new compost and would not have had an effect from the drift as it came later in the season.
I was watching a YouTube story called “Making Tomato Plants 10x more Productive” and this author made me consider my problems with my tomatoes. For one thing, my plants looked healthy and the staked plants grew to 6 feet before I topped them off to prevent further growth. My problem was that, even though they bloomed, they didn’t seem to set on fruit. Although butterflies have ceased to exist in my garden, I still have bees so I must assume that they were pollinated. Then, what few blooms became fruit, they just seemed to sit there and take forever to grow. In fact, some were still trying to grow in mid-September when frost killed the plants.
If you grow tomatoes, I encourage you to watch the film, but it is fairly long and to condense it; The tomato plants only need nitrogen to grow a healthy plant. Once the blooms begin, then the plant needs phosphate. As the small tomatoes begin to form, then the plant needs potassium. The author feeds his plants daily with small amounts of the three minerals listed in his watering system as they need them. Simple, but I think we need to examine a little closer the soil we are planting in.
I worked with the Amish for some three years. The farmer I worked the most with, had a greenhouse. He raised tomatoes and I remember seeing his girls picking tomatoes. They had a 12-foot step ladder because the tomatoes grew to the top of the greenhouse. Originally, he grew them in the ground. I had helped him spread creek bed soil that he had delivered and that would have been great soil. But then he began to grow his tomatoes in bags. He would on occasion take leaf samples and send them off for analysis. Because he grew them in bags, he needed to water them every day and in doing so he added the fertilizer they needed. I don’t know what he used to anchor the roots of the tomatoes in the bags, but because he watered them every day, it could have been something as simple as rocks.
The soil I had used for my tomatoes was an organic compost made mostly from tree limbs and leaves. Although they add some discarded vegetables, that is a small proportion of the mix. I think I am safe to say that the compost probably had sufficient nitrogen to produce a decent plant which I so observed. Since tree leaves and limbs come from plants that go deep into the soil breaking up rocks layers deep below, the compost probably had a good mixture of some 90 micro-minerals. The shortage of minerals would probably be phosphate and potassium. This would explain the lack of development for blooms and fruit.
Let me make one more observation. I had planted one cherry tomato plant in soil that had been in use for a couple of years. It not only bore cherry tomatoes faster than we could eat, but as I didn’t stake the plant, the fallen stems rerooted in the ground and this plant covered an enormous patch of ground. Now I didn’t add phosphate and potassium to that tomato plant. But that soil had had a chance to develop as a living soil because it had plants growing in it and when plants grow in soil, all kind of microorganisms come into existence and when soil is untilled and has growth most of the year, these microorganisms enable the plant to pull existing nutrients out of the ground even though they may not be in large amounts.
But that is a story for another time.