Some thoughts about what to do about leached out soil.

I went out into the garden today to check out what was still growing and viable. I was hungry for greens. The kale looked good and I wish i had planted more of it. It's so hard in the fall, when there are vegetables I'm trying to give away, to think about planting a couple of rows of kale. The broccoli was still putting out flower heads and I harvested some for dinner. I brought the pruners with me and trimmed the plants to they might produce more as the weather warms up. The small beets were ok, but the big beautiful ones had heaved out of the ground and been frozen. There were carrots, of course, and they are sweetest this time of year and have to be eaten soon as they will rot if it warms up.

But what a mess to clean! First dig!
Then take to outside faucet:
Rince off with the hose and voila! they are ready to bring inside They will taste fantastic.

All in all, I have enough greens to eat if the road goes out and I am stranded for weeks. But the rains have been hard and the soil in the garden was muddy and compacted so that my boots got stuck in mud in a couple of places. I was very disappointed in the ground cover I planted. The quail must have eaten most of the vetch and legumes. Only some rye is growing and it adds the least amount of nutrients to the soil. It's going to take a lot of work to get a rich loam out of this mess, but I've done it for years so I know it can be done.

One of the things I'm going to try is to mix this Azomite with the compost and fertilizer I put in each row before I plant. I've never tried it, yet I'm sure after this winter, my soil must have been leached clean of minerals. So I'm ordering several pounds of Azomite and I'll report on it's usefulness. The rest will be up to the truck loads of manure and compost I'll put in the garden.

At 2 Lbs of Azomite - Organic Trace Mineral Soil Additive Fertilizer - 67 Trace Minerals: Selenium, Vanadium, Chromium

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