Sorry for the lack of posts, but posting to a blog while your baskets shrivel up and almost die didn’t take priority. Did I say it had been a sucky year? It has. I learned a lot too though. I learned that fertilizing because your baskets are starting to look a little ugly after having just fertilized a week before is not a good idea.
Long story short all of my calibrachoa and fuchsia baskets are finally coming back. Just in time to donate them to the local nursing homes. I’ve been using a 25 pound bag of fertilizer since last summer. You know how there is always a clump in your fertilizer? Well I worked around that clump for over a year and when all the other stuff in the bag was gone I started breaking down that clump and using it in my normal (10 ounces to a 33 gallon barrel) way. Turns out that that clump had just sat there absorbing more and more moisture until it was a clump of mostly soluable salts that they use to deliver the man made nitrogen to the roots of your plants. Turns out that when it’s a concentrated block of mostly salt it has a way of plugging up your roots like cholestorol does your arteries. Guess what, this causes the roots to not be able to take up anything and the plants quickly begin to show the effects. Veining in the leaves, necrosis in the leaf margins then basically death of the leaves. So as soon as I noticed this problem I being a good steward to my plants what did I do, you got, it I fertilized some more. (so much for making a long story short huh) They got worse and I got madder.
I finally sent off a couple of samples to different diagnostic labs and they both said that they plants were stressed. Thanks I can see that so am I. I started drenching with plain water to wash out the salts built up in the pots and they started to heal up It’s been two months now and most of my stuff is back to almost normal. I cut back a lot of the baskets and they are looking really nice now. The only evidence is the old dead leaves left over at the bottom of the plants.
Another thing I re-learned is that if you have a white crust or film an the bottom of your 4″ pots around the drain holes that you have a build up of salts in that pot. Pour the water to them for a while before you feed them again.
I also found out from the manufacturer of the fertilizer that I was using too much at a time. I was shooting for 300 ppm nitrogen (that’s what I have been using for the last 20 or so years) Now I am aiming for 100ppm which is about 4 ounces of my soluable per 33 gallon barrel.
That’s it for today I’ll post some pics tomorrow.
Before Poly
After Poly this house is in New Mexico, lots of sun
outside of the clean look greenhouse from previous post
The greenhouse feeds the garden and the garden feeds the owner, beautiful surroundings
One of the sweetest customers I have ever had, he was 91 in this pic. This is his second 12×20 greenhouse. He’s growing veggies for his neighbors, for free.
Don’t worry the poly covers all of your mistakes
Getting ready for ground growing, note only 1 run of purlin in the center of the ceiling, it really takes 3 runs of purlin to shed the snow.
What’s inside of your Greenhouse? This is an old pic of one of my houses(yes it’s a pit, sorry) If you send me some pics of what’s growing in yours, now or in the past. I’d like to do a gallery of just customer pics.Those of you that have been here will recognize Mandy the greenhouse super dog.
