Garden Envy

I've come down with two terrible things this week.  The first is a nasty head cold.  The second is an acute case of garden envy.  Across the fence, my next door neighbor also keeps a garden, as well as several contraband chickens.  (Contraband because we live within the city limits, and because the HOC is not so happy about them.)  His garden is beautiful.  Lush vines climbing a bamboo trellis, giant squash-like plants flourishing next to the chicken coop.  I want to know his secrets.  (Chicken manure is probably one of them.)  I never actually SEE him fertilize.  He has a compost pile of leaves in the back corner of his lot, but I never see him turn it or spread it.  I am both mystified and wildly jealous.

My other neighbor put in a couple of raised beds next to her house, and the tomato plants and zucchini are growing healthy and strong.  She did plant in compost, but she doesn't fertilize, either, and her beds get the same amount of sun as mine!

I zeroed in on the difference in color between the neighbor's zucchini plants (on the right) and my own (below).  There was obviously a deficiency that I hadn't addressed; I turned to my many gardening books, and then, the internet.

The Ortho Home Gardener's Problem Solver is my longest-standing resource, filled with common problems and pictures of what the pests and problems look like.  The only downside is that the solutions offered aren't organic, so it's better for identifying a problem than solving it.

One of the potential problems is nitrogen deficiency: "the bottom leaves, including the veins, turn light green to pale yellow and may die or drop."  This sounds like the plants' symptoms, but I did apply nitrogen-rich blood meal earlier this spring, and the fish emulsion I apply every two weeks does include nitrogen, though at a low ratio.  Just in case, I applied more blood meal and fish emulsion today.  

The picture of "Slow growth from too acidic soil" also looked familiar, and my garden certainly isn't experiencing any runaway growth.  My soil is too alkaline (about 7.0 to 7.5, according to a home soil test), but the problem is identified as "incorrect pH," so its reasonable that alkalinity could also be a problem.  The blueberry bush directly behind the garden (a lover of acidic soil), is still producing, however, though its growth is slow.  And even though I found out recently that peat moss can be neutral to acidic, I put in quite a bit of peat moss this spring.

The website www.savvygardener.com offers a great chart for correcting soil pH.  Barbara Damrosch's The Garden Primer also has helpful things to say on the subject, including the suggestion to use pelleted sulfur.  Lastly, the section on fertilizers in The Ortho Home Gardener's Problem Solver is extensive, covering the symptoms for deficiencies of boron, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, and potassium.  Magnesium and manganese deficiencies both sound possible, but The Garden Primer makes a point of saying that deficiencies in minerals that aren't primary is unlikely to be a problem in soil with a lot of organic matter.  

So, what did I learn?  Try a little bit of everything seems to be my current method!  I'll see what the additional fertilizer does, and I may buy some sulfur to add, as well - perhaps aluminum sulfate, as the Savvy Gardener says that it works more rapidly.