My Garden: Part 2

One would have thought that I knew better, but sometimes I get to moving so fast that I end up forgetting about the "gorilla" in the room. What do I mean?

Last year I ordered an Acerola plant over the internet. The plant was two feet tall on arrival, and shipped bare root. Several months prior I had begun a tiny compost pile, and I mixed my compost matter in with my potting soil and a few other things and my plants soon more then doubled in size. My aloe plants went crazy too, but I was really irritated by the smell of the compost heap. So I didn't start one this year up until a few weeks ago.

Well shame, shame, shame on me! The soil is the most important part of growing a garden.

A few weeks ago I showed you a picture of my two new garden boxes, filled with nice, fresh, and dead organic gardening soil. When I say dead I mean the soil had been stripped of all of it's nutrients, which I didn't know that at the time. So now my plants are all bright yellow and not really growing. As a gardener I know it's the soil because I dropped the same watermelon seeds in my older established box a week ago and they are doing better then the plants I planted a couple months ago.

Being an organic gardener, I wouldn't dare use any kinda Miracle Grow type product or anything like that, but let me tell you what I did use that didn't work:

-Seaweed emulsion
-Leaf mold compost
-Fish emulsion

I'm seeing very slow results but nothing like it should be. The good thing is I learn from my mistakes and started another compost pile. The materials haven't decomposed yet but when they do I'm sure it'll work better then anything else I've used. Just like last year I hope. If all else fails the compost will be READY and alive to mix in with the soil for the fall harvest of collard greens, mustard greens, garlic bulbs and other stuff.

Am I a bit disappointed? Well, yeah, a little. But a master gardener once told me that "You're not a real gardener until you kill a plant."

I may be on my way to being a real gardener then. We're just gonna have to ride this one out ya'll.