For the last couple of years it seems like there has been one trial or another when it comes to gardening. And there comes up more and more questions in online communities that sometimes feel repetitive. The one bit of advice I seem to give more times than not is…
Your plants are living and they communicate with you.
Here in the Pacific Northwest we faced another cold spring, even though it wasn’t as cold as last year. As a general rule, we transplant and direct sow seeds around Mother’s Day, mid May.
It wasn’t so long ago that when we planted at this time that our gardens would start of a little slow for a couple weeks and then we’d see some rapid growth.
Last year, local community members thought that their inexperience killed off their crops and it was entirely their fault.
This year community members are talking about what could be the cause for why they’re preventing their plants from growing this year.
In my surrounding area, a good number of everyone’s plants are stuck in the stage of being starts. And more times than not, I keep reading way too many people advise others to just fertilize. And then I see people offer their home remedy fertilizers without understanding what they’re putting in their gardens.
Just because you “fertilize” doesn’t mean that you’re giving the food that you’re plants are craving.
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For example, one post I saw this week was asking for help with a cucumber that was still start sized. The picture was not close enough to see if the cucumber was trying to set blossoms or not. Without this kind of information, people were telling to heavily fertilize but with no discrimination.
Banana peel fertilizer is only good, if your plants/vegetables have set blossoms. Plants putting out blossoms love having higher potassium fertilizer. So the home banana fertilizer is good if you’re feeding a plant putting out blossoms.
Coffee grounds are great for plants that love acidic soil. But if you don’t know how acidic (the pH value) your soil is or the pH range that your plant loves, you can burn the roots of your plant.
In the example of this cucumber inquiry, it was a bad idea to recommend coffee grounds, if the cucumber has started putting out blossoms, because composted coffee grounds add nitrogen and cucumber in blossom wants lower nitrogen levels.
Now, coffee grounds could be great advice as long as it is followed with the additional advice to remove the blossoms. Removing the blossoms, with the coffee grounds giving a nitrogen boost, will help the cucumber grow it’s vines and roots. And in this cold season with plants being stunted, it’s not a bad idea to remove early blossoms in order to give the plants more time to grow structurally and be stronger for later in the season when they have to carry the weight of their fruit.
Another popular recommendation I read was everyone telling this person to put egg shells down around the cucumber. Now egg shell is the DIY fix for calcium deficiency.
The problem with just crumpling up egg shells and sprinkling it around any plant is that the calcium is fixed inside the shell. If your plant needs calcium now, it’s never going to get into the plant in shell form because the roots of the plant are it’s “mouth”. Putting egg shells on the ground around the plant is like putting a chocolate cake in front of you, but there’s a window between you and the cake. It’s there. You’re there. But you’re not going to eat it because a window is in the way. You either have to get the calcium into a liquid form or compost the egg shells down to release the calcium.
The only benefit of putting egg shells around a plant is to keep pests away like slugs. But the truth is egg shells have not kept slugs out of my garden. And I recognize that my problem is that I don’t have enough egg shells down to create a thick or wide enough barrier to discourage the slugs away.
Instead, I find that the best use of my egg shells is just putting them into my compost along with all my other compostable food waste. By using my egg shells this way, all I have to do is reach for my compost and I know that I have calcium readily absorbable for my cucumber, tomatoes, or whoever needs it at a given moment. And by having the calcium already in my compost, it prevents my plants from being deprived or depleted to begin with because they’re getting it in a steady supply.
However, before we got our compost running well, there was one other way that I prepared my egg shells to make calcium more available for my plants. I kept clean and dried egg shells. When I needed to make a calcium fix, I crushed the shells into as small of pieces as I could, put them in a pan, and added water. I boiled the egg shells for about an hour (just to maximize the amount of calcium released into the water). Then inset it off to the side and let the water cool down. Once the water came to room temperature, it was ready to pour in my garden. I poured the water and egg shells into my garden. The water had enough calcium in it to meet my plants immediate calcium needs. The shells in the bottom of the pan had some residual calcium left that could further break down in the soil as it finished decomposing.
To sum all this information up, online community groups are great for picking other people’s brains. But more times than not, they may not fully understand why they use a DIY fertilizer, why it works for them, or why it doesn’t work for them. If you’re that person who asked and got a kitchen list full of suggestions and don’t know which one to try first, take a moment and look at what nutrients are being provided by each commenter and see how it fits or doesn’t fit with the natural life cycle of where your plant is at in this exact moment. In addition to that, look at your plant and look at other clues to see if there is anything else that could potentially be going on with your plant.
Are garden pests present?
On the subject of stunted plants, I currently have a summer squash that is stunted. I know for a fact that it’s due to a squash vine borer because of the split vine. No amount of fertilizing is going to get that summer squash to grow.
It’s easy to see when a start is not growing.
Finding the answer takes a little detective work.
What have been your environmental conditions?
Each plant that grows from a seed relies on its DNA to tell it when move on to the next stage of its life cycle.
We can start our seeds inside a greenhouse or our home to get a jump start on the growing season. But no matter how early you start a seed, the start will stop its physical growth until a little DNA switch gets flipped by the weather. Whether it’s the amount of sunlight, day time temperatures, or night time temperatures… there are environmental indicators that plants look for before they say, “Now is the perfect time to grow.”
As I mentioned above, this spring has been uncharacteristically cold.
For my tomatoes has been fun to watch this year. I planted some from a seed company. And I planted others from seeds that were harvested from tomato plants that were local and went through last year’s cold spring (which was much worse than this year). The tomatoes that have the seed memory of a cold spring have grown much better than the plants that grew with a seed memory of another region.
Can fertilizing compensate for this growth discrepancy?
Yes. However, if your seeds don’t have the DNA memory of what it’s like to grow in a cold spring, they’re going to struggle a little until they figure out what’s going on with the weather.
This is the prime reason why it’s important to either save seeds from the plants that you grow or purchase starts from people in your community who grow from their own seeds. From their seed memory, they are ready and geared to thrive and flourish with micro-regional weather. (I share the same grow zone as some southern states, however our springs and micro-regional weather patterns are going to be quite different.)
But it’s also not just seasonal weather that affects the health of your plants.
This past week we had a hail storm. It’s been several years since we’ve had hail in my community. And these weren’t cute tiny hail stones. These were enough to hurt if we stood out in the storm.
After the storm I went out to check on my garden. And it looked like they were all going to be resilient and bounce back just fine. Especially seeing how we were expecting a couple of nice warm days.
The problem is that once the sun did come back out, I noticed that something was wrong with the plants. I first noticed it with my tomatoes. And I thought it was a tomato issue. But I looked elsewhere and saw other plants were affected also.
This was an important clue to take note of.
My husband sent some pictures over to a friend who has more experience under her belt than we do. With the little information that my husband provided, her opinion was a mosaic virus.
Before her recommendation I was leaning toward an iron deficiency or damage from the hail storm, leaning toward the hail damage because we went from perfectly healthy and happy plants to having visual distress in a couple days.
Whether damage, iron deficiency, or a virus; all three have different care
steps.
This is where you need to be a detective and look for clues.
We were concerned for mosaic virus, but after reading up on it we noticed that other plants, not listed on list of plants commonly infected with this virus, were showing the same distress.
The biggest clue for us is that my second garden, miles away, also all had healthy plants and two days after the hail storm showed the same markings.
We cannot completely discredit a viral infection in our garden without testing it. But we can continue to watch the plants and operate as if we are dealing with this virus (trimming effected leaves off in increments so not to handicap the plants’ photosynthesis, not composting the trimmings and expired plants, cleaning garden tools thoroughly, keeping other plants from growing in their direction, and next year planting the tomatoes (and other effected plants) in a totally different section of the garden).
While I’m fairly certain that I’m dealing with hail damage, prudence says that I also act with caution against the mosaic virus. There is nothing to say that I’m not seeing two issues at once.
I know that not everyone is going through what my garden is going through in this season. These are just examples of how to analyze your garden and the conditions that you are facing this year or in a growing season to come. Sometimes answering your garden woes are as simple as looking up a description phrase in Google and looking at the images to confirm or eliminate potential problems. Sometimes you need to crowd source and pick other gardener and farmer’s brains. Just remember that when you crowd source, people respond with their experience and thinking of what’s going on in their garden at the moment. They don’t know all the additional details, like you just had a hail storm or your neighbor sprayed their property with a chemical that negatively impacts your garden because it carries on the wind. People don’t know if you had contaminated water and your water service provider mails out a letter stating such information two weeks after the fact. Unless you look for pests, you may not be aware that the problem you’re facing is coming from a vine borer, aphids, locusts (or other insect) that has come to your property and hasn’t been there in past years. Or maybe you just bought a new house and the previous owner had diseased crops that they let compost in the ground and that information wasn’t passed on to you in the bill of sale. Or maybe you picked up a load of manure for your garden, but it wasn’t disclosed to you that the animals are hay that was sprayed with Grazon.
I just want to make a special note to give a heads up on this issue of Grazon (a Dupont product) and how it’s silently affecting crops, ground and water health. Here is the video from a farmer who lost whole sections of garden plots. We first watched this video and became aware of this issue. You can source the right materials, but sometimes you have to go further back on the food chain to see where the problem lies. I thought organic manure was the end all bench mark. Now it looks like we have to look further. Here is a very detailed article from 2017 to further jump start your research. This one will open your eyes on the product Grazon. Not just this product, but actually all herbicides. Even if you choose not to use herbicides on your property, you might be buying product from someone who does use it on their property.
There are so many things that can affect the health of your garden and plants. Just be aware that the solution may not be as simple as “just fertilize it”. Sometimes you may need to be your garden’s own detective and look for clues to set you on the right path to bring health and recovery to your garden.
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