Thread: Hydrated Lime ?
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Old March 4, 2013   #4
JohnWayne
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Hickory,North Carolina
Posts: 470
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Paul, Tomatoes, Cukes, runner beans, half runner beans, Rape, kale, turnip, mustard, Radish, beets, Okra, purple hull cow peas and a few watermelon and honeydew vines.

Doug
"The question I have is what was your garden like last year. That should give you an idea where your garden is like before you get test results."

For the last few years my garden has been a nightmare in some ways. Okra that gets only 12 to 18 inches tall. Green Beans that hardly produce. Stunted tomato plants etc.

But then my cow peas were beautiful until the deer ate them. Greens and turnips seem to do well. Cukes do ok as does squash.

The tomato plants have a light green color and never get the dark green they used too. And what few tomatoes I get out of a couple hundred plants have a very high amount of blossum end rot.

This has been getting worse over the last 3 or four years and at first I thought it was because of the drought and the deer. I know the deer ate a 100 foot row of cucumber plants down to nothing and while they don't do that to tomoto plants, what they do is eat the new growth. So the plants should have stopped growing (and they did) and put all that energy into fruit but that did not happen.

I picked maybe 20 small (Kellogg's breafast tomatoes were the size of a biscuit and they were the biggest) tomatoes.

I have spent a good deal of time talking to the wildlife agents and biologist. I gave up hunting years ago and I hate to start it again but find I have little choice. The deer are going to be put down but that is only a part of what is going on.

Last year I hauled horse manure. What would amount to about 10 pick-up loads. All shoveled by hand, Only to find out it had herbicide in it. But I had tried 30+ tomato and pepper plants in the horse pasture beside my house (Had not been farmed in years) and only a corner of the garden
so that isn't my problem.

All in all, I have no idea what to do and I'm about afraid to do anything. It has crossed my mind to pass on the garden this year and take up fishing again. But we are now out of the drought and I already have seed ordered as well as seed sent by members so quitting isn't really an option though finding another piece of ground to garden just might be.
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