Monday, March 05, 2012

Early spring garden...






Most of my tomatoes are in the ground. Beans in the ground. My squash and cuke seedlings are up, only cotelydons for the moment... maybe another week before they're ready for transplant. I dumped something like twenty-five bags of oak leaves in my main garden beds, improved my irrigation "system," and shoveled half a yard of compost... Been harvesting beets, potatoes, carrots...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Michael.

Do you have to compensate for the acidity of the oak leaves in your compost, or does it work OK as is?

Thanks,

Robert
winter Haven, FL

Michael said...

generally speaking, it takes A LOT of acidic material to raise in any significant way the pH of soil. in florida, with our rough, neutral, sandy soil, the impact of a few inches of oak leaves is vanishingly small. they decompose quickly, and any acidity is leached out of reach of the plants' roots quickly.

i think of how hard it is to keep my blueberries below 5! soil here bounces back to 7 so quickly...

in any case, they say that all composted organic material eventually reaches a neutral pH.