The EAC’s Food Connections summer intern, Alison Froese-Stoddard, tells her story of learning about soil while trying to grow the perfect tomato.
I’m a rather lazy gardener, always looking for short cuts and a cheaper way of doing things. As with many things, I have to learn the hard way not to cut corners when it comes to the soil mix in my container garden. This is my somewhat embarrassing story of learning about soil the hard way.
My poor soil actually made an appearance in this blog last summer. It was our first growing season in Nova Scotia, and I was excited to fill up our large raised bed garden. I did very little to the garden soil before planting, apart from mixing in a bit of commercial compost, because I figured that the earthworm rich soil should have lots of nutrients.
The tomatoes on the left grew in the EAC’s office garden from plants I had started. The tomatoes on the right are the same variety of plants in exhausted soil in my own garden.
Not nearly enough, apparently. Combined with very poor spring weather, my tomato crop was incredibly pathetic, and apart from two plants in my front yard planted in better soil, my harvest was almost nil. This year, I did end up purchasing a few cubic yards of compost enriched garden soil, and topped up my garden considerably, along with adding nitrogen heavy bloodmeal , extra compost (homemade this time!), kelp meal, and potassium rich greensand. At the end of June, many of my plants are already larger than they were at the end of August last year! Lesson learned!
However, I’m still learning about potting soil the hard way. Last year I ended up buying a lot of commercial potting soil for my various containers of tomatoes, potatoes and other things. At the end of the summer, I put it in a big Rubbermaid container to get it out of the way. This spring, I pondered what should become of my old soil mix. I checked online, and there seemed to be quite a bit of debate as to how one should proceed in this situation, with some pragmatic folks saying it’s fine to reuse as long as you add a bit of compost, and other people swore against reusing it and suggested throwing it in the compost to bulk it up.
I did end up re-using it, and figured that if I added a few handfuls of compost to each container when I was potting up my plants, it should do the trick. After a month or so, it was obvious which containers had gotten fewer handfuls of compost – some of my plants had barely grown at all! I decided to re-pot the most pathetic of my container plants with extra compost, bloodmeal and greensand. This time, I mixed my old potting soil with lots of compost, and added my amendments at the suggested rate, and once it was all mixed well, I repotted the plants.
It took a few weeks for my plants to recover from the transplant shock, but in the end I’m really glad I did it. The above picture shows two of my tomato plants – the one on the left was the plant that originally was thriving due to the extra compost in the mix. The plant on the right was the repotted transplant with the extra compost, bloodmeal and greensand. What a difference! After I took this photo, I made sure I top dressed the spindly plant with more nutrients as well, and I’ll periodically add some seaweed fertilizer to my watering schedule throughout the summer. I did realize a bit too late that I should have used a larger pot when I moved it the second time, because the small pot will ultimately stunt its potential growth. However with some luck, these plants – along with the others in my garden - will grow enough tomatoes to put away for winter!
