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All across this land you will find that one half of your crops grow just fine, and the other half struggle just to survive, this is the nature of the environment, as well as the different requirements of the plants.
But thanks to these young crafty Chinese kids, there are now accurate tools to easily measure critical limits of soil ph and nutrient content in the soil.
This tool alone could reduce a 50 year work load to just 5 years.
The trick being, having the right ph well drained soil to go with the just right amount of nutrients, for the plants that have a different local ph or drainage conditions than the one you are currently in.
This is best done with containers but as usual, its easier said than done, for one you want to be able to use as much of the local organically treated soil as you can, and then adjust the ph, drainage, and nutrients for the plants desired.
The bigger problem is the time, energy, and now cost to do all the buying and endless mixing, and since its endless i'll have to bring in some machine(s) to do the mixing, but it could take a number of years to do much beyond small container growing.
So with each successful yearly small container success, you can move to larger containers, and thats what i'll start here with the lower ph plants. The date is 4-14-2025 and a mixer has been found and should be in service very soon, but the videos of the month have mostly been lost somehow.
The fruit trees are a different story, apparently if you dont shape and control the first years growth (in the right environment), these store bought trees just reach heights that wont allow them to feed or support fruit properly, so by cutting and then splicing the tree, you force a new growth to then be shaped into the next best thing after a missed first year opportunity. After that, the older the tree the better as it appears the base never gets bigger than its original cut size is my guess, we'll just have to wait and see about that one, I saw this on a Victory Garden tv show but never caught the results until perhaps now.
MAY
​With these tools, and by trying enough different things, you should be able to discover a problem in short order, the time to resolve it, is another matter.
Knowing the difference between good and [bad advice, (lemon juice and apple cider to lower ph., kelp and its derivatives)], or perhaps misdiagnosing the many small issues a plant might have, takes time to trust, but is well worth it in the long run.
Right now we've hit the nail on the head with the fruit trees and eggplant numbers, and are close on some others. So w/o having a uniform mix of soil ph and fertilizer, you are going to have to have mixed results, and some of this is seen this month.
I found this combination of blended soil holds water well, so if you find yourself watering inbetween rains for any reason, now you've might have gone too far in one area,(this bodes well for future watering needs though). As can be seen with these tomatoes, i'm still trying to find the best ph range for tomatoes by examining the health of the plants, and then taking the readings of the healthy plants first, in that way I can double check the veracity of the published #'s numbers.
And with this case, I can tell you that until you get the nearly correct (fully mixed ph) soil readings of the plants requirements, there is no benefit to raising the fertilizer amounts, as the plant is unable to use the excess, and could even have a challenging negative reaction. Not only this, but as the ph drops under the 5.5 range, fewer fertilizers are even effectively absorbable into those plants, blueberries being one, (but now responding very well to proper conditions) and the eggplant and potatoes approaching it.
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