nancyjane, you mention having tomato fungal issues last year in a brand new garden bed. I am doing a research project and would appreciate an answer to the following question.

Did you add homemade compost to last year's garden bed which included fruit scraps/pealings from your kitchen? If so, would you expand on the types of fruits? Thanks.

I answered this on a former post. No, I didn't use home made compost.

I thought that question sounded familiar, lol.

Yes, been gardening. I tend to do some microgreens and scrap buckets in the winter, that helps the itch. But I'm now 4 weeks into seeding, just started the 8 weeks out stuff a couple days ago. Got a couple trays full of seedlings outside under the greenhouse cap, and the last scrap bucket and garlic bin got moved out too.

Figured out why I wasn't seeing crocus pop up in the new bins. I managed to put the sack of them in with all the big bags of feed and groundcover seed last fall! Oops. So yesterday I quick cobbled a raised bed from scrap wood in a spot I had cleared on the side of the barn... and in went the crocus along with a bunch of glads, and botanical glads, irises, and lilies. Should be fun once we get rain in over the weekend and they start to take off.

Hasn't been warm enough for the ground bees to start coming out, so haven't been doing much cleanups yet.

Tomatoes are going into the same spot this year- soil is fine but it was a bit depleted so I gave it a good hit of the meals and manure last fall when I had the wagon out doing the garlic bed.

Bummer you were having fungal issues in a new bed. Do you think you got some bad soil or amendments? I had a bad fail a year or two ago with some store bought soil that ended up killing the crap out of a lot of my seedlings and the ones that survived just did not have a good growing year. So I got the feels for having it new and still going wrong. Very frustrating. Or if you buy your tomato plants maybe you brought home dirty plants- heh, I've done that before too.

I have no clue about the soil being bad!

I do have an older bed that was filled (5 years ago) with construction rubble, that I had dug out and filled with decent soil.

I'll be planting the tomatoes in that and rotating everything else!

If I still get fungal stuff, I'll have to solarize all 3 beds! NOT great for a pretty new garden!

My old garden was 15 YO, and rarely had any problems.