For 'the real, true' gardener..

Jace

Jace

Well-known Member
A TV commercial with Martha Stewart was promoting an additive to soil to make it organic.
She then said she was a dirt nerd.

Would you considered yourself to be?
or do you use  any old dirt?😉
 

@Murrmurr ...the product was Miracle Grow..
don't know the ingredients..
But,.maybe it adds more nitrogen..
Or..'contacts' the ph-factor
 
Murrmurr said:
Maybe I'm a nit-pick nerd, but isn't soil already organic? I suppose she means she's adding nutrients, not oganic-ness.
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You're a smart fella, Murrmurr.

"Organic" as in "organic gardening" has a fairly different meaning from organic as in "organic chemistry". There may be some carbon in a quite depleted soil, but in organic farming or gardening the aim is to increase the humus content in the soil's upper horizons.

We're organic gardeners here, in our food gardens. Though for instance with annual flowers, which do well with a quick input mainly of four or five nutrients that may not be very present in a depleted soil, we'll used something like Miracle Grow. We save our rotted manure and the compost we make for the food gardens. And we don't use pesticides, or herbicides... which means we do a lot of weeding.
 
On my grandmother’s farm we used the dirt under our feet and rotted cow manure for most things.

Sometimes we used a chemical 10 10 10 fertilizer consisting of equal parts nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

Now, I pick up the smallest bag of the cheapest potting soil I can find.

Original Miracle Gro is convenient to use when watering elderly houseplants. It comes with a little plastic scoop, or it used to, and you dissolve a small amount in a quart of water.

A small box will last most apartment dwellers a lifetime.
 
MarkD said:
I imagine that is more for growing veggies. I sometimes side feed but mostly just use the soil that is there.
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Mark, what was your soil there like when you first began gardening?

Our situation may be very different. We live in a somewhat flat clearing of what was formerly a conifer forest. In a conifer forest, the soil nutrients are mostly drawn up into the tree itself as it matures. In the natural cycle, nutrients are later returned to the soil as the tree and its roots decay. In our situation, the trees had been cleared for sale to a local lumber mill 30 years before we arrived, and roots were mostly bulldozed out. The subsoil was sandy, the topsoil was thin. So we had to build up the humus.
 
Jace said:
A TV commercial with Martha Stewart was promoting an additive to soil to make it organic.
She then said she was a dirt nerd.

Would you considered yourself to be?
or do you use  any old dirt?😉
Click to expand...
Dirt is everywhere, even in the air. Often you can just look down to find stupid dirt.
Soil, a precious complex substance, is not so easily found.
I wouldn't trust any 'soil additive' to cancel the ill effects of weed and bug killers, and salts etc to create an organic soil.
 
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JBR said:
Mark, what was your soil there like when you first began gardening?

Our situation may be very different. We live in a somewhat flat clearing of what was formerly a conifer forest. In a conifer forest, the soil nutrients are mostly drawn up into the tree itself as it matures. In the natural cycle, nutrients are later returned to the soil as the tree and its roots decay. In our situation, the trees had been cleared for sale to a local lumber mill 30 years before we arrived, and roots were mostly bulldozed out. The subsoil was sandy, the topsoil was thin. So we had to build up the humus.
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Very different. At least you are knowledgeable about how to cope. What are you doing on that lot now? Pictures?
 
Nathan said:
Miracle Grow ingredients :

View attachment 367004

"14% Urea Nitrogen"....hmmm, isn't that like...pee?
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Nathan: We used to have a gardening show here in Oz , called "Burke's Backyard". He used to visit various people's gardens and had a look around. One lady's place had the most beautiful flowers, and he asked what nutrients she added, "Just watered down pee pee. " You should have seen the look on his face.
 
MarkD said:
Very different. At least you are knowledgeable about how to cope. What are you doing on that lot now? Pictures?
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Here are some, Mark...

The "side garden" near our house
Side Garden.JPG

The pond... and the willow I planted
Pond & willow.jpg

This year's winter-squash patch
squash plants-1.JPG

Corn patch, and a few sunflowers next to it
Corn-1.JPG

A nice broccoli
Broccoli with Cup.jpg
 
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MarkD said:
Very appealing layout and setting. Looks very rural. I imagine you will have left defensible space around your house.
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I believe I understand what you mean. "Defensible" in that our place includes about an acre (a sand bench) on which we have our house, DW's sculpture studio, some utilitarian outbuildings, various plantings, a feral-grass 'lawn', a now-big maple tree I planted, and just a few of nature's broad-leaf trees that we've chosen keep. Beyond that is some scrub field, and surrounding it all are our property boundaries — our edges, on three sides, are smallish groves of natural conifers that separate our place from neighbors' properties. And, thankfully, we get along with all of our immediate neighbors.

View from the front gate
view from front gate.JPG
 
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