Soil Test

First let me describe our garden layout.  We have five raised beds - two that have existed for a couple of years (about 50 sq ft between them) and three new 4' x 4' beds that I constructed early this summer.  Here is a picture of the back yard with the five raised beds.  The three new ones are in the far back of the picture and one of them has a piece of shade cloth hanging over part of it.





Here is a closer picture of one of the new "square foot gardens" with some summer experiments growing. And therein lies the problem. These rather pathetic looking plants (some beans, a cantaloupe, two armenian cucumbers, three basil plants, and some kind of flower) have been growing most of the summer and this is all I have to show for it.

I tried to do the right thing.  I constructed the raised beds:

Then I paid a visit to Singh Farm and bought a pickup load of compost - good stuff.












I filled the new "square foot gardens" with a mixture of this compost, some bagged steer manure from Lowes, and vermiculite.  I have also added a little organic fertilizer (fish emulsion) from time to time, but it still seems to be missing something.  So before I go all-out planting my fall garden I thought I better have a go at figuring out what's wrong.  I decided to get a soil test kit and see it it would shed any light on the problem.

The procedure to use the test kit is straightforward but you have to follow directions and be careful.  To do the N, P, and K tests you have to add 1 cup of soil to 5 cups of water, mix, and wait for it to settle.  Then you fill one the two chambers in each of the test containers with the not-quite-clear liquid and add the contents of a capsule of chemical to the liquid in one side of the container.  The procedure is similar to test the PH, except you add the garden soil directly to the container.  Here's what I got for my new gardens:

It looks to me like Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K) are pretty good, but no Nitrogen (N) whatsoever!  (If you can believe this home soil test.)  I do believe it.  Compost consumes nitrogen while composting and if you use it before its has finished decomposing, it is very nitrogen deficient.  I guess this  compost wasn't quite ready yet.

Here are the results of the test for the two older gardens.  As you can see, ph looks OK, just as it did in the new gardens.  P and K look alright, also.  N in this case looks on the low side (just "adequate" according to the color chart) but at least it shows some color.  It's not as bad as the new gardens.

So, I will be adding some nitrogen to the gardens, especially the new ones before I do any more planting.  I'm not opposed to using a little commercial fertilizer but I got some blood meal (high in N and organic) so I'll use that first.  If a couple of applications of that don't do the job, we may have to bring out the big guns.

One Small Victory

Since my last post I have been fighting the great aphid war, and I have definitely won this battle, at least.  I settled on Terro to kill the ants that protect and herd the aphids.  Two applications of a few drops on a couple of blocks of wood daily has had a dramatic effect.  Very few ants are left on the plants in the garden. Here is a picture of some of the remaining ones ones having a nice, sweet bedtime snack.

 I also used a double barreled approach on the aphids themselves: insecticidal soap in the morning and water in the evening (or vice-versa, it doesn't matter).  The insecticidal soap is a home-brew concoction made of approximately one pint of water, one teaspoon of Dawn dish washing liquid, and a half teaspoon of vegetable oil in a spray bottle.  The proportions are very flexible - no need to actually measure anything.  I drenched the plants with this liquid, being sure to get under the leaves.  You have to actually get the little buggers wet for this to be effective, since it works by coating them and cutting off their air supply.  Then in the evening I came back and hosed off the aphids with a strong stream of water.  (Turn the hose on slow and put your thumb over the end to get a nice spray.)  This knocks most of the bugs off the plants and makes them very discouraged.  There is nothing so pitiful as a soapy, drenched, depressed aphid.  Anyway, gradually, after a period of a week they have all given up and gone elsewhere.  Hurray!  The black-eyed peas are looking a lot better now, even putting out a few blossoms, finally.

And one last note, here is a picture of the summer squash that I planted this week.  They have already germinated and seem to be OK with the summer heat (about 105 today).

Aphids!

Jan (my wife) planted some black-eyed peas at the beginning of the summer in a couple of our raised beds just to have something growing over the hot summer. She read that they would do well in the heat and would make a good cover crop that would add nitrogen back into the soil (being legumes). Well they're surviving but not really thriving. One reason is that for the last couple of weeks, at least, they have been covered with aphids.

I've started to do battle with them, however. I've tried insecticidal soap and spraying them off with water. Either seems to work for a while, but they come back very soon. I'm now trying a new approach. The aphids are "herded" and protected by hundreds of small ants. The ants direct the aphids onto the most promising plants and "harvest" the "honeydew" excreted by the aphids. The aphids suck the juices out of the plant and thereby weaken or kill it. I'm going after the ants first, then the aphids. My ant killer of choice is Terro liquid. It's a sweet liquid containing borax as the active ingredient, so it shouldn't be harmful to humans. You put a few drops on a piece of paper or wood or whatever and the ants flock to it. It is slow acting, so they carry it back to the nest and it gets them all. At least that's what the package says. So far they've flocked to it alright, and seem to be eating it. They also cover the drops of liquid with dozens of small bits of grass and other detritus. Maybe they're trying to hide it or save it for later. I'll give this approach a couple of weeks and see what happens.

I also planted two hills of yellow summer squash and seeds for two sunflowers in one of my square foot gardens. I consider this to be the first outdoor planting of the fall garden 2011! Hope it's not to hot for the seeds to germinate.

It's Hot

I've been reading Dave Owen's book Extreme Gardening, in which he describes how to grow vegetables in Phoenix. He goes through many of the popular vegetables and tells when to plant them based on soil temperature, so today I went out to the garden to measure it.

It's hot. At around three in the afternoon the soil temperature varied from 92 degrees to 120+ degrees F, depending on whether I measured underneath mulch, in the shade, in the sun, and the depth (2 - 5 inches). About the only thing I am ready to plant that Mr. Owens says can handle those temps seems to be cucumbers (and maybe sunflowers). I may get around to planting those this week. Most things for a fall Phoenix garden seem to want to wait a while yet.

Due to it being too hot to direct seed much in the garden, I did the next best thing: I started some seeds in some seed starting mix inside.

If you look closely you may see that I am starting some broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, nasturtiums, alyssum, and marigolds. The flowers are for "companion planting" and organic insect control. We'll see. Something should start to sprout in a week or two and then I will remove the plastic wrap (which helps keep the humidity up and the soil moist).

Background

Since this is my first post on this (or any) blog, I'll write a little background.

I am a transplanted Michigan native who has lived in Arizona for over 20 years. I used to have a decent vegetable garden back in Michigan, but I never worked very hard at it. I didn't have to. Dig up the ground, plant some seeds, pull some weeds, add a little water occasionally and stuff would pretty much grow. More or less. Arizona (at least in the low desert) is different. I've tried to grow vegetables off and on ever since I moved out here and it's a battle. If it's not the terrible soil or the 110+ degree temperatures, then it's the rabbits, havelina, or birds that end up winning. The vegetables that made it to the table in the first few attempts were few and far between.

But since "success is 99% perspiration" or something like that, we keep trying. Lately my wife has had some luck with lettuce, kale, etc. and I grew a mean looking zucchini plant (and a few zucchinis) along with some tomatoes this spring, so there is hope. This blog is meant to document our fall 2011 gardening adventures and perhaps provide us with motivation to keep learning. It may even provide you, the reader, with some helpful information if you're new to Arizona vegetable gardening. That's it. Nothing fancy or unique. Look for my next post tomorrow (hopefully).