By George! - A Blog!

One thing is for certain and that is for us to amend the soil now for the coming summer season.  Dig deeply after adding manure or compost, ammonium phosphate and sulfur.  You did this in the fall but our soils are so low in nutrients to start with and what we put there six months ago has been used up.  This is not much of an argument for those gardens that have been dug extra deep and received twenty bags of steer manure .  Those plots can be lightly tilled (use the rototillers) to establish a nice level bed that uniformly takes water from the drip system. Also some beds are narrower than three feet, so chip away at the edges to get the full area that you deserve and need.

If you planted onions, the grower in Texas who supplied us with the plants recommends sprinkling a little ammonium sulfate on the soil (not on the leaves, please) and watering it in. A light scattering is all that’s needed because we’ll be doing it again in a month’s time.

Our soil remains cold and gardeners could find the very best time to plant by taking the soil temperature and studying the “Soil temperature” list in my book, “Desert Gardening”.  If you plant in cold soil your tomatoes, peppers, etc will simply sit there, but there are tricks you can play on Mother Nature.  One is to lay clear plastic on the ground and to plant though slits you have cut.  Another is to surround the small plants with a “Wall-o-Water” that you buy at a nursery.  It’s a bunch of connected plastic tubes that, when filled with water, act as a solar collector greenhouse.  Another “trick” is to use the top layer of your garden soil where it is warmer and use the nature of tomato plants to put out extra roots from the stem.  Lay the tomato on its side in a shallow trench and cover it with warm top soil.  If you plant the tomato in an upright position to get extra roots from the stem you’ll be setting out the plant in the deeper and colder soil.  There are pictures of this trick in my book.

Any mulch you put on the soil now will keep it cool because the soil will be shaded. For the months of March and April we want bare soil that the sun can warm up.  A four-inch mulch goes on the soil around our plants for the summer, starting in

May, but not now.

Later on you might notice a crust on the surface of your plot when the evaporation exceeds the drip delivery, at the beginning of really hot weather. It needs to be broken up by a little scratching and you can stop it reappearing by scratching a little compost to give the soil a more organic feel.  Some gardeners have scratched in coffee grounds to get the same effect.  An organic soil allows for a more efficient water soaking ( instead of the crust that actually repels moisture and gathers salts).

Tomatoes need a lot of room ( maybe four feet from the next one) because we don’t prune them.  We want a large bush that bears fruit under the foliage to ensure fruit won’t crack or have leathery skins in the hotter months.

Remember to put in tomatoes first, followed by peppers, and finally the eggplants in order to match up the different plants with the changing soil temperatures.