To: NAFEX Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [NAFEX] weirdly useless soil
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 00:29:39 -0400
I have very rocky soil. Whenever I dig a hole, I need to get
additional soil to fill it in, since I've tossed so many rocks aside.
And this spring, when I bought a big new pot for one more tomato
plant, I bought a bag of expensive "Coast of Maine" soil to fill it.
I have 4 big pots, each with one tomato plant and some smaller stuff.
(3 have basil, 1 has a seedling currant I decided to try to grow out,
and one also has an alpine strawberry that came from I know not where,
possibly it's a feral seedling that I didn't weed out.) The tomato in
the new one looks horrible. It lost all but one or two leaves, and it
just a 2.5' stalk. I don't think it ever flowered.
I attributed the tomato's failure to viruses and whatnot - it's some
random thing advertised as being from Russia, and didn't claim to be
resistant to anything. (The 4 tomatoes are each different
cultivars.) But I just noticed that the basil in the pot has also
failed to grow. Yes, the cold rainy summer wasn't kind to basil, but
the basil in the other two pots is 2 feet tall and has gone to seed,
and the basil in this pot is only a bit larger than when I planted it.
Any theories?
I'm also wondering what to do with a giant pot of bad soil. I don't
really want to dump it on the mulch pile, as I've started to mine that
for loam. I suppose I could dump it next to the mulch pile, where a
pile of dirt won't be an eyesore.