Garden Failures...

In the past few years I put lots of efforts on returning the plant residues to soil, building up soil organic matters and having chicken manure as my main organic fertilizer. However, certain plants are getting increasingly challenging to grow and when they do, they have lots of pest pressure in mid season. These plants include kale, radish and maxima squashes.

I have been confused for a long time and this year I grew corn and saw unmistakable signs of sulfur deficiency. When I looked closer, many other crops were showing signs too, but less noticeable. I applied Epson salt to stunted plants it quickly triggered growth spurts in all of them. Since Mg is a micronutrient and I didn't see Mg deficiency prior, the effects were not from addition of magnesium.  To confirm my speculation, I did another soil test with sulfur included ( S not included in basic $20 soil test from MU extra $5 for SO4 test) and the number is very low at 6 ppm. In farm land soil, 15 ppm is considered the critical level.

Sulfur is the fourth macro nutrient plants need and works synergistically with nitrogen. There's a global decline in soil S due to less deposit from air pollution. In some places it has become the rate limiting factor in crop yield. I have harvested lots of food from my garden in the past years and don't return nutrients as humaure so Sulfur is leaving the system. I do have chickens fed with purchased feeds. Apparently, inputs from chicken manure is not enough to replenish what's lost especially if grains in the feed are also grown in S deficient soil.

My garden soil has gradually decreased S level due to nutrient removal and tie-up in fruit trees. High demand veggies are the first to be affected since they are like canary in a coal mine. Oilseed, cruciferous, allium and legume are all well known high S crops. Low S-demand crops are showing more pest issues because the soil amended with compost has a higher nitrogen to sulfur ratio. The harvests will thus have a lower nutritional value too. In the long run, I am going to correct the deficiency with gypsum and elemental sulfur.Mystery solved and I consider all these garden failures are blessings in disguise.  Now I have a better understanding of soil health and nutrition balancing. I am going to grow all the challenging crops again next year and see if they will do better.

As someone said, where to start.

I had a plague of snails and slugs. So I got some ducks. But planting in a sandy soil, with free range ducks in a Mediterranean climate - not much would survive. Strangely, a single zucchini plant did and even produced a good crop. That encouraged me. So I decided to go with wicking beds. (Old bath tubs do well.) But the ducks jumped up into them - yum, they thought. A low fence stopped that. Except in the winter, when there is torrential rain, everything grows like mad and then the fence bends over.

After a couple of years, the gum tree roots found their way past the bath plugs and into the tubs. That took me a while to work out.

But, I'm still going.