The Grackle Moon (and Easter!)

Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, and this year that full moon happened to fall on Good Friday. It's been warm lately, in the low 80's, and we had such a mild winter, that lots of action is happening out in the garden. Easter is the holiday where we Texans enjoy the outdoors for one last time before it starts to get too hot to be comfortable outside anymore.

The roses are really taking off now. To the left is the big red rose bush, which now has 8 or 9 blooms on it. To the right is the smaller rose bush that was here, which has just revealed itself to be a yellow rose.

My in-laws gave us a couple of Shrimp Plants to plant in the front flowerbed, which is rather shady under some large oak trees. Shrimp Plant is a native to southern Mexico and Guatemala, but does very well here, and the hummingbirds love it.

The hummingbirds also like the Texas Lantana that's starting to bloom in the back yard.

And they love my Pineapple Sage. The most common hummingbird we have here is the Black-chinned hummingbird. They look just like a Ruby-throated hummingbird (which is the most common hummingbird east of here), but they have a purple throat instead of a red one (which looks black at certain angles). I wish I could get you a picture of them, but they're just too fast.

 Even the plain old Common Sage is blooming, with lavender flowers.

We got two cubic yards of compost from GardenVille to put in the vegetable garden. That seemed like a lot, but I've already used up about half of it. It says it has stable bedding in it, and it smells slightly of ammonia, so I hope that means it's rich in nitrogen.

The garlic that I transplanted from the old house is doing even better than I thought it would. It's already growing back new leaves. On some varieties you can hardly even tell anything happened to them.

The peppers are all in. Here you can see Basil checking on them.

The tomatoes are all in too. These are the ones I planted first, and they're already about twice as big as when I put them in.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad bug year. We had a mild winter, and then lots of rain. There are tons of mosquitoes, but also caterpillars. Some unknown caterpillars have already been eating up my tomatoes AND peppers. At first I thought it was the work of tomato hornworms, but when I found some of the caterpillars, they don't look like hornworms at all. They don't have the horns on their butts, and have dark stripes going down the sides. I went ahead and sprayed the plants with Bt since some of them have been almost completely defoliated.

Another bug in abundance are these strange looking creatures. They're EVERYWHERE. They're kind of scary looking too, shiny black with six legs in front, and big pincher-like jaws. There are also lots of these metallic green beetles that run quickly around. Well, some Internet searching, and searching through The Texas Bug Book, revealed that the green beetles are called Caterpillar Hunters, and the strange black creatures are their larvae (I thought they bore some resemblance to large ladybug larvae!). The good news is both the adult beetles and the larvae have voracious appetites for caterpillars! So from now on every time one of the larvae wander into the house or garage (and they seem to do that a lot!), I catch it and put it out in the garden. I've already seen two of them viciously attacking caterpillars several times their size in various parts of the yard. They are certainly aptly named.

Well, that's about it. Happy Easter from Basil and me!

Soil Test for the New Garden(s)

Just got my soil test results for the new place. Looks like I'm going to need to do some work. I took a sample from the area in the back I want to plant a garden, and the area in the front where I might also plant a garden. Both areas are, in general, not as good as my former garden, and the front here is in worse shape than the back, which doesn't surprise me. It looks like the area in the back had been a garden before, and has probably been amended in the past. The area in the front, on the other hand, if it was used for anything by previous residents, it was for parking cars if the driveway was full. I got the same test that I got for the last garden, which tests the NPK, pH, micronutrients, and organic matter content. I noticed they have added some more tests I could do, like seeing the % of sand, silt, and clay, but I decided this test covered what I mostly care about.

My previous garden had a pH of 7.6, which is only slightly alkaline. It was low in nitrate, with 5 ppm, slightly low in sulfur, with 11 ppm, and organic matter was pretty high at 6.34%. And this was in a patch that I hadn't added anything to. All the other nutrients were above the critical level (CL) which means I had enough of them.

The patch in the back, which is now all rototilled up, is not as good as my previous garden, but not too bad.

pH = 8.1
Nitrate = 3 ppm
Organic Matter = 5.14%

So the pH is even higher, the nitrogen is lower, and the organic matter is lower (but still pretty high, because from what I looked up, anything above 5% is good). I wonder if adding a load of composted manure could help with all those things. All the other nutrients are above the CL, so they're fine.

The front yard is in the worst shape. The pH is even higher, the nitrate is hardly detectable, the organic matter is even lower, and it's also deficient in phosphorus. All the other nutrients are fine.

pH = 8.2
Nitrate = 1 ppm
Phosphorus = 34 ppm (CL = 50)
Organic Matter = 3.33%

I'm going to have to add a bunch of manure or compost or something, and I'll also have to find a source of phosphorus to add as well. When I looked up what to add for phosphorus, I got bone meal and rock phosphate. I'd rather use bone meal, since it's a meat by-product, instead of something that has to be mined, like rock phosphate. Don't know how much phosphorus manure or compost would provide.

Texas A&M also lists the NPK requirements for the more common vegetable crops, which is helpful because the soil test just gives a general critical level for vegetables. I was thinking of planting squash in the front yard for this first year, and letting the vines roam around freely in that big space. It says that squash needs 20 ppm of nitrate, 45 ppm of phosphorus, and 125 ppm of potassium, so I'll have to give them both nitrogen and potassium to make them happy.

I guess the good news is that phosphorus stays in soil much longer than nitrogen, so once I build up my level, I shouldn't have to add more again for a long time.

My Soil Test Results are In

That was certainly worth the $25. Now I have some real data, and there are some surprises, mainly about how GREAT my soil is! I am never again going to tolerate people saying the soil around here is lousy (like that guy at Lowes the other day trying to sell me a bunch of stuff to fix it). I was careful to send in a sample of soil that I hadn't added much of anything to yet, just to see what I have to start with here, and it turns out that my soil is awesome!

The pH
I suspected my pH would be alkaline because of the limestone, but it only came up "slightly alkaline" at 7.6. (I was thinking it would be something more like 8.) That's not too bad, really. Most plants would do fine on that except for certain ones that really want acid soil, like potatoes and blueberries.

The NPK
The soil nutrients plants need the most of are nitrogen (N), phophorus (P), and potassium (K). Those are the three numbers you see on all fertilizer packages, the percents of each of those elements in the fertilizer, in that order. For each of the nutrients, A&M gives me my level in ppm, and a "critical level", which it says is "the point at which no additional nutrient is recommended". What I got was:

Nitrogen: 5 ppm
Phosphorus: 78 ppm (CL = 50 ppm)
Potassium: 338 ppm (CL = 175 ppm)

That means the only nutrient I'm short on is N. My P and K are well above the level needed for any crops I would grow. And here I was going easy on the N if I added any fertilizer, because I'm always hearing that adding too much N is bad for fruit and root crops, because it makes them just grow leaves. In reality, that all depends on what your soil already has, and actually I should be adding fertilizers that have high N numbers and the P and K might as well be zero. Adding more P and K is just going to waste. That knowledge alone is worth getting the soil test, because otherwise I would be wasting money on fertilizers I don't need.

Looking at A&M's website on how much N different fruit and vegetable crops need, it ranges from 0 ppm for beans (which can get nitrogen from the air) to 100 ppm for potatoes. I'm also surprised that potatoes need so much nitrogen, because again I was told too much makes them grow all leaves and no tubers. On the other hand, Carol Deppe says potatoes are relatively high in protein, at least compared to other starchy vegetables, and proteins are made of amino acids, which contain nitrogen. (Legumes are high in protein because they can get nitrogen from the air, but any other plants need it from the soil.)

I think I've solved the mystery of my lousy potato yield last year. Turns out they needed a lot more nitrogen! I didn't bother with potatoes this year, but now I know what to do for next year to get a good potato crop.

Other Elements
Just to be sure, I ordered the full soil test that tested ALL the nutrients that matter to plants, not just NPK. They were all above the CL, except for sulfur which was only slightly low at 11 ppm, while the CL is 13 ppm. A&M said, "Available sulfur may be found deeper in soil profile, thus limiting any response to added sulfur." I guess that means it's not low enough to worry about.

As I suspected, my calcium was high, but I had no idea it would be THAT high, at 9,341 ppm, while the CL is 180 ppm. According to commenters on GardenWeb, that could be because the soil sample I sent in had little bits of limestone in it, which were dissolved with A&M's extraction methods and led to that really high number. Since in nature limestone dissolves much more slowly than that, the actual Ca available to plants is probably not quite so high, though I'm sure it's still plentiful.

Organic Matter
My organic matter is 6.34%, which seemed low, until I started Googling on how much organic matter soil is supposed to have, since A&M didn't mention it. In a natural setting at least, organic matter ranges from 1% in a forest soil to >5% in a grassland. Which means that my organic matter is actually on the high side! That's good. And again, this is without me adding any more. Of course, like any good gardener, I'm always adding more organic matter in the form of compost. As I understand it, you can't really have too much, and it's always being used up and has to be replenished anyway. But it's good to know that I'm starting with a healthy amount of OM to begin with.

Soil Improvement Goals
Now with good, hard data, instead of guesses and people trying to sell me stuff, I can concentrate any improvements on what I really need, which seems to be little more than nitrogen and acid. Luckily, there are a lot of good organic soil additives out there that are high in nitrogen and may also be acidic. Planting lots of legumes is also supposed to help, since they fix nitrogen in their roots, and then when they die and decay, they release that nitrogen into the soil. Though I'm not sure how much N legumes just use for themselves, and how much they really put into the soil for other plants to use.

Daniel wonders if having low nitrogen is typical for soils of this area. The native plant community does have a lot of legumes in it, from bluebonnets to rattlebush to mesquite trees. That may be because the soil is just naturally low in nitrogen.

Well, that shouldn't be too hard to fix, and it's good that nitrogen's the only real problem I have to deal with. It will be interesting to get a second soil test in a year or two to see if I've made any difference. That time I will get one of their simpler tests, since my other minerals are fine, and probably won't change much from now on.

Getting a Soil Test

Finally I'm getting around to doing something I've been wanting to do for a while - getting a soil test done. Being in Texas, I'm using Texas A&M's soil testing lab for this. There's my plastic bag of at least two cups of soil.

I'm doing this mostly out of scientific curiosity, and not because I think there's anything wrong with my soil (though I guess I could be surprised). I just thought it would be kind of interesting to get some sort of baseline, and maybe even later have it tested again to see if I've at all improved it (if I do end up living in this house for much longer).

It doesn't cost all that much. The actual fee for the sample ranges from $10 - $25 depending on how many things you want them to test. I am tempted to go all the way and get the $25 test done, which measures pH, N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Na, S, Zn. Fe, Cu, Mn, conductivity (I'm not sure what that is), and organic matter.

Then this shipping will cost about $5 because soil is heavy. I'm trying to cram it into a Priority Mail small flat rate box. It looks like it will just barely fit.

I didn't quite follow the directions on how to take a soil sample given by A&M. They say to take soil samples from different parts of the area you are testing and mix them up, being sure to get samples from areas of different soil types. I'm more interested in what my baseline soil is before meddling with it, so I was careful to sample an area that I have NOT messed with much yet (by adding compost, fertilizer, etc.), and I also avoided the areas of my garden that have a lot of sand, due to once being under an above-ground swimming pool.

I hope the results are interesting. Texas A&M gives the recommended NPK amounts for various crops, which is interesting in itself to compare different crops (like how regular potatoes apparently need way more nitrogen than sweet potatoes), and should be even more interesting once I get my results.