By George! - A Blog!

When you were gardening in the East and Mid-West you probably were told to save the ashes from the fireplace and put them in the soil at spring digging.  This was good advice, but for us in the desert regions it’s actually bad advice.

The reasons for this are that soils in the eastern states are most often acidic and need to be neutralised.  That’s why lime is often applied to them.  Soils in the desert are invariably alkaline and putting lime on them, and gypsum too, simply makes bad things worse.  We want to make our soils less alkaline by putting on acid and we do this by digging in sulfur which ,with moisture, turns into sulfuric acid and the alkali soil is thereby neutralised.

In either case the operation has to be repeated because the neutralising lasts only a short time and we can’t put enough material on the ground to have a lasting effect. The enemy, as it were, is too numerous and has lots of reserves.

As an aside (almost) you may get advice at nurseries to use gypsum but you shouldn’t buy any unless you have a special problem.  That problem is having too much sodium in your soil. Calcium excess (the alkalinity we mentioned ealier) is bad enough but sodium is far worse and in alkaline soils it has to be got rid of. The way to do this is to dig in calcium (in the form of calcium sulfate, or gypsum) and use plenty of water to wash out the now-soluble sodium.You are left with the problem of too much calcium and this must be treated by repeatedly digging in sulfur, as we mentioned earlier.

Wood ashes won’t usually add sodium, but they do add its cousin, potassium, which is a plant food as well as being an alkali.  It so happens that most of our desert soils contain adequate amounts of potassium for good plant growth, so there’s no need to add it to make up any supposed deficiency.  Back to a nursery.  There’s usually little need to buy a fertiliser that contains a lot of potassium, besides which its the expensive part of any “balanced” fertilizer.

So, what to do with our wood ashes? When they are cool ,put them in a paper or plastic bag and put them in the trash.  Don’t put them in the compost pile, as you did in the east, because the compost pile is only one step away from putting the ashes into the soil.

Got Weeds?  After our gentle winter rains a lof of weed seedlings have come up. Try this easy way to kill them off before they get bigger, begin to flower and produce more seeds for next time around.

For sure you’ll get good results from strong weedkiller chemicals, but you may not like most of them.  Spray the little plants with vinegar on a calm bright sunny day.  They’ll die and the vinegar, what’s left of it, will gently acidify the soil.  You might even call the operation an Organic one.