i'd say, unless its a vast quantity of soil or you legitimately cannot afford another bag of dirt, throw it out. i mean, you could bake the crap out of it, but that's a lot of effort to create an extremely dry and crumbly soil, and if it has those little slow-release fertilizer beads in it they'll get melted and weird and stinky. don't throw it in your back garden, either, or it'll infect your yard. put it in the trash for pickup. if you have municipal composting it's ok to put it there, they make sure their compost gets hot enough (and it stinks to high heaven, i used to live down the street from one of those places. they turn the compost with bulldozers! it's cool to watch but oh man there is a Stonk.)
Back yard compost piles can get hot enough to steam in the dead of winter if it's got the correct balance of carbon to nitrogen and if you're out turning it daily. Generally, most people can't manage them that meticulously.
yeah, true, i forget sometimes that not everyone lives in minnesota. :P edit: but the reason i don't advise trying to do that is because the virus will infect the soil beneath/around the compost pile, which doesn't get hot enough even if the core of your pile does. unless you've got the compost in a plastic composter or on a concrete slab, in which case you could probs do it. but my compost is on bare dirt in the back corner of the yard, so i can't put anything infectious in there or it'll spread. i mean just aside from the fact that even if i was paul bunyan and could turn my compost daily in the dead of winter, when the wind chill is -30 there's no way decomposition will get hot enough to keep it from freezing, let alone kill mosaic virus. the st paul municipal compost site was a huge concrete parking lot and the compost piles were as big as a semi trailer, so they did stay steamy most of the winter, but even those shut down during the coldest part. one of the signs of spring was when the musty funk of composting highway brush and restaurant scraps began to waft again in mid-march. :P
can anyone recommend any good sites to mail order seed potatoes on? they don’t have them in yet locally, and i’ve checked both rareseeds and seedsnsuch to no avail. preferably i’m looking for places with a decent heirloom selection and ideally for it to be somewhere i can just order potatoes, garlic, and onions all in one go rather than having to hit up multiple places, but at this point i’m not going to be terribly choosy X)
Looks like Seed Saver Exchange has some https://www.seedsavers.org/category/potatoes My broccoli is always leggy and I don't know why. They're getting 14 hours under T5's they should have plenty of light. The cabbage literally right next to them are fine. So why? The tomatoes and peppers are great. Those Purple Russians especially are really jammin', I'm pleased with them and they were one of the free gift seeds. The onion variety I picked this year is... Not impressing me with germination rate. That's really disappointing because we eat onions like crazy here and these are supposed to be good keepers. At this rate I only have 10 good plants out of them. Going to have to go out and look for starts when the farmer's market opens.
if you find out, let us know. my broccoli that was planted outdoors in a very sunny place went leggy too. i begin to think that's just normal for broccoli and they do something weird to the store stuff. you know, kind of like how store celery is always a tight vertical bunch with stems thicker than your thumb, but garden celery is a firework explosion of stems the diameter of a pencil.
RHS advice is that broccoli prefers cooler temps. If the roots become too warm, the plant will bolt. Mulching is advised to prevent this in warm weather.
Ah that could be it. They're in the upstairs linen closet and while the closet itself isn't heated, we do keep the upstairs warmest because that's where I have my snake babies. good for tomatoes and peppers, not so much for broccoli I guess.
yep, that explains my experiences too. in minnesota, 'spring' is often a few hours long, and idk how many times in my life i've played in melting snow in shorts and a t-shirt because it was snowing one day and mid-70's the next. which is to say, there is no time when the ground is thawed that it doesn't get hot in the daytime. gardening around here is actually kind of problematic, now that i really think on it. it goes deep freeze -> slush -> perfect weather that gets too hot mid afternoon -> monsoon -> 24/7 rice steamer -> yeah but it's a dry heat -> slush -> deep freeze. there's no cool-but-not-cold period.
Yeah, I thinks that's one of the reasons I'm pretty glued to the PNW. We still have a month and a half of hard frosts and possible snow flurries and mud from the 2 foot pile up melting, and it's going to be raaaaaain, but from here on out till about the end of May we'll have more day over freezing than under, but nothing hotter than low 70's. Fall is the same way pretty often! I've been meaning to build some cold frames up and get some greens going since for ever ago. I want more greeeens.
i'm jelly. we're just doing the switch from 'black ice' to 'slush' here but that's going to persist until sometime in late april, and then may will be an e-z-bake oven, and then june is monsoooooooon. there is no good time for leisurely puttering in the garden. you go directly from 'dirt ice' to 'workin on the chain gang' :P edit: speaking of the ice-to-slush transition, i just literally watched rain turn to snow over the course of ten minutes, and while it means the roads are monstrous, it sure was cool to see.
I know older gardeners so this with crushed eggshell which is also a calcium source so it might be accurate. Unsure if a single stomach tablet is the most cost effective or efficient - or safe - way of getting calcium to your plants, though.
I'm not sure how immediately bio available the calcium in those tablets would be to the plant (liquid fertilizers are usually immediately available, where as powder amendments have to break down, and things like egg shells slowly release their nutrients over time as they compost and should be added the season before you want to plant anything out- the calcium tablets usually break down in our stomach acid so idk how long they take to break down in the soil), and it's always a good idea to test your soil before adding amendments (maybe you already have enough calcium!) AND you can still get blossom end rot from inconsistent watering because a stressed, sporadically watered tomato can't absorb the nutrients properly anyway. So not terrible but also knowing your soil and how much calcium you need when and what source gives to best when you need it I think is a lot better then guessing.
The bioavailability would probably be linked to the soil's pH - the more acidic the soil is, the more available solid calcium sources get.
Most vegetables, tomatoes included, thrive best in soil that's neutral to slightly acidic. So. Probably a while.
a bit of googling turned this up: https://laidbackgardener.blog/tag/antacid-tablets-for-tomatoes/ in summary, your soil almost certainly has enough calcium already, but irregular watering can keep the plant from absorbing it. just keep em watered and they'll be fine. that said, i'd think if you're concerned about calcium content, a sprinkle of bone meal would be cheaper, more soluble, and less likely to contain metal salts that might interact badly -- or just weirdly -- with the soil chemistry. it's a classic low-tech fertilizer. you can buy it in big bags at the hardware store as soon as gardening season starts. it keeps forever. it doesn't fizz. just scatter it on your garden beds and work it in a bit before you plant, maybe not even every year, just any time the soil fertility seems to be flagging. when i was a young and vigorous bear, and thus did a lot more hands-on gardening, i lived in minnetonka -- glacial-scrape lake country, with sandy soil that was rather acidic from pine mulch and fairly nutrient-poor -- we threw a 4 pound bag of bone meal and a 20 pound bag of manure on the backyard every spring, and our garden pretty much exploded with vegetables every year. the tomatoes were unstoppable. never saw blossom end rot once. so if you're working in a similar soil that'd probably work great for you. here in northfield, though, we're on limestone and fossil shale, and the groundwater is extremely hard, so adding more calcium would probably just make it crusty. and yet, despite so much calcium that the outside of clay flowerpots develop a white bloom, i get blossom end rot just about every time i plant tomatoes. because i get a pain flare and miss a watering at a crucial moment. so i guess that's anecdotal evidence for the water theory.
Have you looked into self watering beds? You would probably need someone to build one for you, but a raised SIP bed might b make gardening easier.
i really can't do a half hour of video tutorial, especially since he talks kinda slow and monotone, and moves the camera around pointlessly a lot. my verbal processing shut down two and a half minutes in. i don't suppose there's a diagram anywhere? it's an awful big project, though, and i don't have anyone i can ask to do that kind of work for me.
