One way to gauge the fertility of your garden soil is to simply plant something, and see how it turns out. You might find that your greens and beets turn out OK, with no lime and no fertilizer. If you have some compost available, that will usually improve the garden soil. And, of course, you will have to weed and water to get good results.

I'm not sure what you read, but perhaps it referred to pH and fertilizer, as lime is alkaline (basic), so it usually raises the soil's pH when added, which can affect nutrient availability to plants' roots.

For my CA coastal subdivision soil, adding lime means almost all the available phosphorus disappears. The chemistry is a bit complex for P in soils, but between 6-7 is usually good enough and if you go over 7.5, like it's easy to do here when people mistakenly add lime to fix the clay conditions, the phosphorus is bound by the calcium too tightly for the root hairs to suck up the nutrients and flowering and crop production tends to be poor. Iron is also bound in high pH soils, causing chlorosis.

But if you have acid soils, it can be fine, I just don't know much about it under those conditions though.

The theory is that IF your soil needs lime then the pH is off (too acidic) and adding fertilizer at the same time would be a waste of money since the nutrients wouldn't be available to the plants anyway given the pH. Lime takes time to have any effect - 45-90 days or more. That's why lime is normally a fall amendment if needed.

On the other hand, if your pH is already ok and so doesn't need the lime added then adding it anyway will only screw things up even more. Makes the soil pH too alkaline and the fertilizer gets wasted again.

Lime isn't a standard soil amendment, especially without a soil test first, so when in doubt, leave it out. Fertilizer in various forms is a standard amendment.

Dave

First, Do you know what the PH of your garden soil is ?
Second, great majority of garden veggies can thrive in PH range of 5.8 to 7.2.
Third, if you want to increse the ph, the best time is in the fall after
all the crops are gone. The effect of lime is not instantaneous.
It will require several months to interact.
Fourth, Not a good idead to add Nitrogen to soil when adding lime. Why?
I do not know the exact mechanism of it, but I think you will loose "N"itrgen.
I am sure you will get an explanation about that.