Good garden soil

Good gardens begin with good soil. Pretty simple statement, and basically that's the truth. We can have the best of seeds, fertilize like we should, water it sufficiently, do it just like we should, and if the soil isn't right, we won't get much. I believe there are a few essentials that will make or break a garden and a few simple things that will greatly enhance our success.

Probably the most important step is getting your soil tested to see what it takes as far as fertilizer or lime or micronutrients. Pick up a soil test bag at your local Extension office. Ask them how to get your sample dug the right way. Then once you have your sample, bring it back for testing. May cost $20, give or take some. They will ask what your main crop is or what you grow the most of. I'd say green beans or eggplant if I was you.

Green beans need a pH of about 7 and eggplant a pH of 6-7. Corn is 5.8 to 6.2. Cucumbers are 6 to 6.5. Zucchini is 6.5 to 7. Eggplant is 6 to 7. Tomatoes are 6 to 7. Carrots need a pH of about 7. The only crops you will need a lower pH for are potatoes (5-6) and sweet potatoes (5.5-6.5). Green beans are right in the middle. Now if you had an awesome crop of green beans or eggplant last year, your pH is probably pretty close to pH of 6-7.

The second thing is we need to prepare the soil or get it ready. How depends on the time of the year. Right now at the beginning of February, we should have our garden pretty well cleaned off. Doesn't have to be perfect, but the old plants need to be gone or mulched up. Our goal is to take all the old plants off the garden spot and compost everything but tomato plants, which we burn. We never put our old tomato plants on the compost pile. In our tunnels we either leave it as bare ground or plant turnips in them in mid-August. They will eventually die from lack of moisture, and we'll till them in the following spring or beginning of March. Our hill garden is totally planted to turnips mid-August, and we enjoy them till a heavy freeze turns them mushy. These we disk the garden in March. In my opinion, nothing works as good as purple top turnips as a cover crop. Nothing!

Work the soil sometime in March but don't work it if the soil is too damp or wet. If you can take a handful of dirt and squeeze it and it makes a compact ball let it dry some more. Once you have worked the soil, then lay out what you are going to plant and where. The experts say to never plant the same crop back where it was last year, and probably good advice but for me that doesn't work. I have to do what we have to do. So many of our crops go back in the same spot. Still works. We simply may plant a different variety of the same crop in that same spot.

When it comes time to plant a row of, say, carrots, I mark the ends of the row and then put down some fertilizer. I just fertilize where I'm going to plant the carrots -- say a foot wide swath. I then work the fertilizer into the soil either by tilling or a rake. I use 12/12/12 or 13/13/13 fertilizer. I also scatter a little pelleted lime down each row as well. Not much, but a little. I use a cup we got with milk replacer to scatter the fertilizer and lime. About a 10- to 12-ounce cup. Say a cup full every 15 feet or so. Years ago I weighed it out, did some guestimating and came up with this ratio.

We use a planter that automatically scatters the seed as I push it down the row. For carrots, we use the carrot disk. We water in carrot seed.

The key is take your time. Don't hurry.