Fertilizer

[BattleOfBennington]

Mycorrhizae

I have seen a couple different types, and a few with trace elements added.

Are there any vendors I should use or should avoid?

[oc tony]

BVGardener has a nice pictorial of his variation of Earls hole method. Maybe someone could hot link it. The title is Pictorial diary of my 2007 fall garden.

[habitat_gardener]

I use homemade compost, added to the soil whenever I harvest some, usually in late spring and a bunch more through the growing season. In past years I've done some foliar feeding with seaweed. I've played a little with humic acid amendments, which a local nurseryman recommends for late-season tomatoes when the nights get really cold. I may try some alfalfa meal in one bed this year. I mulch with ramial wood chips that have aged at least 6 months in my garden paths.

I went to a talk by Jeff Lowenfels, author of Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, last week. He gave a great summary of why organic gardeners say "feed the soil, not the plants," and why to avoid chemical fertilizers and pesticides and rototilling. (I'll start a new thread in the organic forum about that.)

[Barbee]

Feldon,
Thanks for posting Earl's Hole Method. I left method off the search, so maybe that's why I couldn't bring it up. Color me

[Gerald51]

Originally Posted by amideutch

I owe most of my tomato growing success to two products.
Mycorrhizae and Actinovate. Sure the fertilizers play a very important role but if your plants aren't healthy and disease free all the ferts in the world aren't going to help.
I grow in containers primarily but also do it in the dirt at my surrogate garden at work.
For containers in addition to the above I use Bio-Bizz Bio-Grow which is 8-2-6 for the grow phase and later use Hesi Floraison for the fruiting phase which is 4-3-5.
For my dirt grow in addition to the amendments I put into the growing medium to include horse manure I use a German product called Neudorf Tomaten Dunger 7-3-10 which is a dry fertilizer that comes with mycorrhizae,calcium and micro's. Later in the season I will give it a shot of Hesi Floraison.
Basically it's going to boil down to availability of the products and whether you want to grow organically or inorganically or a combination of the two which I sometimes do. Either way it's a learning process by trial and error to come up with a formula that works best for you. Here's some pictures from last year's grow.First 4 photo's from my container grow outs and last 2 from the surrogate garden.Ami

That green plastic mesh that's holding up the tomatoes in the lower picture, where would I get something like that? I'm thinking it would work great hung from a 1/8" cable strung between to points about 8 foot above the ground.

[amideutch]

The mesh is a plastic netting used for pea's and cucumbers. I bought it locally here in Germany. But have seen it at internet grow sites in the States.

BOB, The two sites I use to purchase mycorrhizae from are fungi.com and T&J enterprises BioVam. I've got them listed in the sticky at the "Gardening in the Green forum". Ami