sophia compton

Hi all,
last year many of my sweet potatoes had tiny worms inside, I think wireworm? They dig tunnels.  I have never used nematodes and dont know when to buy them and apply to the soil since I hear they may not survive in some conditions, I live in central texas where it gets hot and I will plant my slips in may. Do I just water nematodes into the soil?  When?
Any help appreciated.
sophia

I have not gardened in texas for very long and this year is so much rain, I know I will prob lose my potato patch, it certainly is not ready to harvest, and more rain is coming. My onions and garlic are almost ready and sitting in tons of mud and my question is: should I pull them all up even though most of the leaves have not fallen over, and when I do should I wash them off? I know mostly it is good to just brush off the dirt, but in this case they are wet already after the rains last night and I dont have a lot of time before it rains again. How to harvest roots early...?
thanks, sophia

Jen: tomatoes never grew very large and although they would flower, they never made fruit. The squash and zuccini growing  in the same garden space did great and kept producing even through the heat.
sophia

I always bury my leaves in the fall and my spring they have turned into nice dirt!
Thanks everyone, the new ph test is what I was hoping for, I will give it a try.
sophia

Good to know. I am using a ph meter that is metal. I used this in my four different gardens and it read 7.0 everywhere I sunk it into the dirt. I cleaned it after each use. My soils are all different. The newest one has no soil amendments at all.  Finally i sunk it into a bag of compost and it read the same, then into a bag of SULFUR and it read the same. Obviously there is something wrong with this ph reader.

Can anyone tell me if I should try and make my soil more acidic when it consistently stays at 7.0-7.5 on the soil meter? I am in my third year at a new site where I built up the soil with bagged compost and manure (and leaves) the first year but it did not change the ph. Which I found amazing. I cannot afford to continue to buy compost and do not make very much of my own compost, since I live alone. This year I have added sulfur in some places, and I have heard vinegar is a shorter, quicker fix. But I dont know if i need to fix it. I dont know that much about ph. Most of my garden plants did ok, but a few (like tomatoes) did not.
sophia

Good to know.
I have observed that some plants are not bothered by my many sunflowers but some things dont do well under them, which I grow for partial shade. So I am glad to know I can compost them. I read an article that said that the most obvious place where sunflower toxicity is visible is under bird feeders and I have noticed that my plants all died in an area where I had a bird feeder with sunflowers with hulls. So I am glad to know I can compost them. Not sure about the bamboo. More research needed for that.  I also have castor bean which is a beautiful plant but so toxic that I did read once that it should not be composted. I am more interested in sheet composting, which wont get hot, so i will probably put the stalks thru a wood chipper and throw them in the new bed i am making for spring. I imagine I can use most anything green for a nitrogen source, right? I have a lot of arugula and mustard that I planted as a fast-growing cover crop in between my summer and fall garden.

Anne, I have heard that cedar is not toxic as some believe and i wish i could get any kind of wood chips. I live in a town of 2000 and i think free wood chips are more available in suburban areas.
I like your quotes by Stephen Buhner btw.  I learned a lot from his books, and wrote an herb book myself many years ago.
sophia

I am looking at the plants I have a lot of in my garden space that i have not used much in the past because I have heard they are  allelopathic to other plants (at least some plants). So I wonder if I can use bamboo leaves and the large stalks of the sunflower in composting or sheet mulching? I have lots of bamboo hedges and many sunflowers piled up in a space by themselves which I have pulled up. I am thinking of chopping them up for new beds for sheet mulch, along with grass, leaves and straw.  I also want to grow more biomass plants in this space (this is my third year at current site). I have other herbs that I use as biomass: yarrow, comfrey, mints etc. Any other ideas I can grow for biomass at texas (where I can grow in winter as well) would be appreciated.
sophia

I will do some searches for quick growing biomass plants--besides my herbs--that I can use for my sheet mulching project.
many thanks
sophia

What do you mean by "highly organic material soil"?  My soil is three years in the making but surely not highly organic if it has chemicals from my city water....I presume.  From my understanding it is tricky to buy "organic" compost as many composts are now tainted with aminopyralids or something similar. I wonder if the soil in the forest near where I live would work for this project??? And how much per five gallon bucket?
many thanks
sophia