Hello everyone!
My husband and I are first time gardeners and we need all the help we can get!
We live in New Brunswick, Canada, and are preparing our first vegetable garden.
Since we didn't prepare for our garden last fall, we are wondering how we can get the best out of our soil now.
Some people have told us manure would be best, and others have said fertilizer.
We are real beginners here, so looking for some advice....
A great big thanks in advance for any tips you can give us!!
Manure would be great if you can find some at a good price. Lots of people will let you clean out their barn for free manure but it is a lot of work then you need to age the fresh manure about 1 year before you use it. Add lots of organic material to your soil.
Wood ash is good for the soil too but not for potatoes. Pine needles are good for potatoes.
Fertilizer is much easier and you can pick and choose what you need for each plant your growing.
15/15/15 fertilizer works great for just about everything.
I can get all the manure I want, for free, from a neighbor/farm, and he will even come deliver/dump it for me. But like you mentionned, since it needs to age, this should've been done last year in preparation for the garden, right? So it wouldn't be the best idea to use manure now, for a garden we're planting next week?
LLandry11 wrote:I can get all the manure I want, for free, from a neighbor/farm, and he will even come deliver/dump it for me. But like you mentionned, since it needs to age, this should've been done last year in preparation for the garden, right? So it wouldn't be the best idea to use manure now, for a garden we're planting next week?
Only use well composted manure. Fresh manure will burn the plants. I have a large horse stable near my house and they muck their stalls daily. The stuff removed will contain straw, wood shavings, manure and of course, urine. If I get the stuff fairly fresh, I'll pile it in my yard and add other things to it to make a compost pile. If I can get to the stuff that has been sitting and decaying for months, I'll use it straight in my garden. That older stuff is like gold.
Ok, so if I can get the "good stuff" manure, then I'm good to go with that.
If not, then does everybody agree with 15/15/15 fertilizer?
We are planting a lot of different veggies: potatoes, carrots, peas, green beans, beats, tomatoes, spinach, peppers, etc....
A soil analysis will be a good place to start. I had mine analyzed years ago, and I learned that because of the alkalinity of my soil I should avoid manure and because of the high salts content of my soil, I should avoid wood ash.
Location is everything. In my case, we go without rain for weeks at a time. My soil is alkaline, and my potassium is way too high. My soil is clay/sand, leaning toward clay in most cases. I have a 6" to 8" layer of rocks over the entire property, rocks I remove with a rock hammer before I can dig.
Therefore, to prep my beds, I add peat moss to condition the soil, perlite or vermiculite to assist in water retention, compost to feed the plants, and bone meal for fruiting. For corn, I add blood meal. For new beds, which are considerably lowered once I remove the rocks, I add bagged topsoil. It's a long process the first time I make a new bed. After its first year, though, I only add bone meal and compost, unless I'm growing something with special needs, like the corn I am trying this year.
(It won't germinate. This Alaska-bred variety says it's too cold in Wyoming to germinate. Give me a break.)
