867-5309

I'll be adding rock phosphate, coffee grounds, and home-made compost (leaf/grass clippings mix) this year. Next year I will just put the compost and coffee grounds on top of the soil, no tilling.

A far better time to amend your soil would be the fall so the Soil Food Web has a chance to get that material into a form your plants can use. Many of the organic materials people add to their soil take several months of work by the Soil food Web to become available to plants. Spring is okay and adding material to improve soil is best done anytime, but for your garden fall is better, and all the soil amendments that my planting beds needed were added last fall. and the compost bins filled up so I will have material to add this fall.

My gardening style has always been to add the amendments in the spring as I'm planting. As a result of doing this for 32 years I have wonderful soil. While the best time to do this may be in the fall, it's too cold and I'm burned out on gardening in the fall. As we all know, adding goodies to our soil anytime is better than never doing it.

My question remains the same, what do those of you who amend in the spring, add to your soil? When I plant annuals, perennials, shrubs, trees, or vegies, I amend that area only.

Thanks again
Ginny

867-5309 - I believe that was "Jenny" not "Ginny" lol!

Anyway, to the question at hand: Currently I add homemade compost in the fall, spread some of Steve Solomon's home made fertilizer first thing in the spring, and then mulch with my latest batch of compost around the first day of summer. I also mulch with shredded leaves covered by straw over the winter, but most of what's left of this ends up in the composter come spring. This winter I've been dumping coffee grounds on top of the mulch as well.

Cheers,

Tim

I add my compost, LOTS, and cottonseed burr compost, some, and always still add bone meal, composted manure, green sand, LOTS, some limestone, I know most folks would poo poo at this, but the results keep getting better and better every year. Most of my seeds come from my garden, so I feel they are " acclimated" to the abundance of nutes available and keep flouroushing. I may be a dummy, but I feed many, mant peepe from my endevours, and never have problems. heheheheh. I also add some nettle meal, some comfrey tea, lots of other teas, and have a "hookup" on worm castings, and apply atleast 1/4" a year on top of this. You would think that after a few years that the soil level would grow too high, but it stays only a few inches above at first, then drops to the same. I pulled a few shovels full tonite, warm day, and had more worms and nitecrawlers than I have ev seen. My yields are legendary amongst my neighborhood. Good luck Timo

Hi Ginny,

I'm using alfalfa meal, coffee grounds and mulches. I only make one bin's worth of compost. The compost is for my 33 roses.

Michelle

Might sound funny but I'm actually REMOVING right now. I'm removing rocks in my garden area because I'm expanding the size of my garden. Once I get done removing, I'll be adding finished compost and stable manure.

I need all the organic material I can get to mix with this clay I've got.

I will spread my compost this spring. I spread compost whenever it's ready---spring, summer or fall. I'll spread the litter from my chicken coop, which I only muck out once a year in the spring. I'll spread any other manure I can find. I'll lime with a magnesium lime. I'll spread some green sand and some rock phosphate. If I have leaf mold, I'll spread that. (I never have enough leaf mold.) I'll mulch my vegetable bed with newspaper, seaweed, and hay. I'll mulch my flower beds with newspaper, seaweed, and chipped leaves (or preferably---leaf mold).

Last year when the bedding plants went in, I made small pockets in the soil/ leaf mulch/ lasagna and filled them with screened vermicompost from the worm bathtub (which contained leaves, UCG, kitchen wastes -- and also contained lobster shells & chicken poop from Maine!) then sprinkled homemade compost lightly over each plant, compost kindly sent from New Hampshire, Illinois, and California. Then topped off each bedding plant with more local vermicompost.

Once planted, every bed was topdressed with UCG, alfalfa pellets, and a fine wood chip mulch.

But, this year... there's only a tiny wee bit of Illinois compost left over. So, all my plants will probably die. (sob)

All the best,
-Patrick

p.s. The 2008 "Help Save Patrick's Garden" campaign is now underway. Donations of US compost (one full gallon, please) will be gratefully accepted at par. Please give generously.

I had a bad feeling about Patrick's post the minute I started reading it.
He's so predictable.

Some rural people are kind and generous and thoughtful about the poor deprived innercity folks who lack their advantages of oceans full of seaweed and great steaming piles of chicken manure and tall forests filled with leaf mold.

Then, there are the other rural people.

All the best,
-Patrick

Shame! Shame! Shame!

When I think of the risks I took mailing chicken manure and lobster shells to Canada! First I had to eat the lobster. (Who knows when my seafood allergy will kick in?)
Then I had to harvest manure with its potential salmonella spores flying up my nostrils.
Then I had to drive to the post office in a car. (It would have been safer for me to fly it to Toronto.)

I heard that I'm on a mainland security list somewhere now. I'll probably get arrested the next time I try to cross the border.

And for what? Some never-satisfied, manipulative, cagey Canadian?

Annpat did put herself at major risk. Frankly, I'm still rather surprised, given how tiny the box of miniature compostables was. And how much Maine air it contained.

The standard "it composted enroute" excuse was written all over. Should have expected it, but I'm a loyal, trusting soul. We Canadians have been taken by these sharp Yankee compost traders for centuries now; someday, we'll learn.

All the best,
-Patrick
(postal address available on request. Help Save The Garden!)

"Donations of US compost (one full gallon, please) will be gratefully accepted at par."

I love the "at par" inclusion. The way the US dollar has been moving, I would almost expect that you'd need an imperial gallon (or at least 4 liters) of the US compost.

Patrick, e-mail me a mailing address, I'll send you a sample of my premium, super-dooper, ultra-soft, moderately moist compost to try out.

Lloyd HRC

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me!
LLoyd! Why would you ask Patrick for his address when you can get it from me?

He's from Maine---near Bangor. I'll send you the specifics.

BPGreen, it's a sad comment on changing times. Back in the day when I went to university down by the Ontario/NY State border in Niagara Region, us Canucks got lured across the line by "Canadian dollars accepted at par!" Because our dollar was always lower than yours, back then.

It's no pleasure for any Canadians with Amurrican friends to see how badly your economy is doing these days. Oh, I'm glad my personal purchasing power is higher. But I'd trade that in a second to see your country in better financial shape. We export more to you than any other country in the world, y'know? And we buy more from you than any other country does. Fact. We matter more to you than China or Japan.

Anyway, there's many Canadians hoping your nation will have the sense to fix your broken finances. You folks are in trouble, and you're our friends. I hope your government and your business community smartens up, quickly.

Lloyd, will fire off the snailmail to you shortly. God bless you man, you'll help keep starvation off the streets of Toronto this summer.

All the best,
-Patrick

p.s. The "Help Save the Angelstone Garden" appeal continues. Your personal donations of compost are needed. Don't let Patrick go to bed hungry tonight!!

Lloyd, Annpat and I crossposted.

She is lying. I am not from Maine. I showed my Canadian (and my British) passport around in Maryland, last October. Many reputable and well-known people formerly from this forum saw the photographic proof in those government documents. If you need references, I will provide.

It's so sad to see Annpat still trying to take revenge for the past. Y'know, she has openly admitted stealing compost? It's true.

I'm only saying this because I still have to look out for Patrick Jr. If it was just me, I'd let it slide. I'm noble, that way.

All the best,
-Patrick
(always looking out for the little guy)

Now kids, lets fight nice now.

I have lots of compost Ann, if you are in such dire straits that you have to resort to chicanery, I could probably send you a little care package. Seriously, is it legal to send compost to the U.S. as a gift?

Lloyd

Lloyd, as a fellow Canadian -- with Manitoba in my genes -- let me seriously implore you: don't send compost to Maine.

It is illegal, yes. And it is immoral. Especially given the potential recipient of your kind offer of compost is operating an illegal battery chicken operation, hidden away like a moonshine still in the backwoods forests of Maine.

Oh, it all sounds so nice. Names for the chickens, and cute anecdotes about them. The ugly reality, Lloyd, is in the caged pens of thousands of trapped and long-suffering birds.

And the ruthless owners feeding stacks of bills into their money-counting machines, barely looking up to snarl at the underpaid migrant workers harvesting eggs.

Don't be fooled like so many others, Lloyd. There is a vast compost-consuming maw in Maine, entrapping the innocent and the naive, spiraling down into horror. Remember where Stephen King came from. It's gotten that bad, down there.

Toronto. We may not be your favourite city, but at least we don't spawn Godzilla and Mothra.

All the best,
-Patrick
(only trying to save a fellow Canadian from the horror)

"I have lots of compost Ann, if you are in such dire straits that you have to resort to chicanery,"

You have got to be kidding me. I can't believe this. This reminds me of childhood when my brother threw a shoe (or a pie plate or a bicycle pump) at my head and my mother would say, "Children, stop fighting."

Yes, it's perfectly legal to send compost from Canada to Maine---NOT that I've ever received any compost from Canada. Evidently all the streets there are one way.

And I'm practically Canadian myself, Lloyd. I spent my first four years in Newfoundland.

(chicanery :)

Most of our compost goes on the garden in the spring because it was made the previous summer, and needed time to cook; that's about 7 pallet bins' worth. I agree fall is a better time to add material though. Tomatoes escape blossom end rot if the soil where they'll be planted is amended the previous fall and then left alone. We do try to spread a thin ~2" layer of compost or mulch or seaweed over all the soil, where no cover crop is growing, in the fall. 'Never leave the soil bare' is one of the tenets of organic gardening.

As a Canadian, I think it will be perfectly appropriate for any Canuck to send compost to the USA -- once they return all our beautiful Canadian topsoil scraped off the bedrock and taken south by the glaciers in the last ice age.

Gardeners and garden books tell you that parts of the midwest of the USA has topsoil twenty feet deep. Lloyd, I think you should claim a foot or two of that. Get Anita and her bobcat busy, and bring back what belongs to you.

All the best,
-Patrick

Pssst Patrick...Anita is in BC, somewheres 2 hours drive south of Alaska. Shshh! maybe she won't hear us.

Lloyd

ROAD TRIP!!

All the best,
-Patrick