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.