I want to write about soil chemistry. A very brief overview is as follows: I became interested in gardening when three years old and by the time I was a teenager I was putting as much (sometimes more) food on the table as my father. I had pretty much taken over the family garden and spent more time there than all of our other family members put together.
Winter Squash was my number one vegetable that I enjoyed growing the most, but there were others including sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, potatoes, radishes, rutabagas, watermelon, muskmelon, cucumbers and a few other miscellaneous crops. In my late teen years I discovered that I could use foliar feeding to shorten the maturity date of Winter Squash. In fact, one Australian variety was listed as a “100-day” maturity and I grew it in 85 days with a very vigorous foliar spray program. To back up a bit and explain, to the uninitiated: Foliar feeding is a method of providing plants with nutrients by dissolving them in water and spraying them directly onto the plant’s leaves.
At that point in time I knew very little about soil chemistry. All I had read about was the basic “NPK” which shows the amounts of the chemical elements nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the soil. But that oversimplification is severely short-sighted. Try to be a carpenter with only three tools. It doesn’t work. Now, fast forward to age 40. A friend introduced me to the Albrecht system of soil testing, but I just read the information and set it aside, which is what 99% of other gardeners would do as well. In 2004 I did my first soil test which was at a friend’s place of business, but it was more to satisfy my curiosity than anything else. Then in 2009 I did my first basic soil test (a Morgan soil test) for my own garden and started to apply the knowledge gained by it.Continue reading“Soil Chemistry Basics, by D.N.G.”
