I have spent the past few days doing the normal weed pulling and watering, but we have had some recent rain so that really saves me a lot of time. I put out more fertilizer before the rain and hope everything starts to look really green soon. It is a great time saver for me to put the fertilizer out before the rain and not have to water the fertilizer in with the hose.
My main chore lately is removing all the dead plants in pots, I had not realized just how many I had until I started really taking inventory. I doubt many of them died because of natural causes,I think my spray incident from last year is probably what caused the demise of most of them. Now I have a stack of empty pots. I am wanting to move all the pots around so that I have the healthy looking plants and the larger plants up near the top of the hill. The tiny fans and weaker looking plants I want to move down lower and keep them potted up for another year and see how they recover.
I just finished inventorying everything and will start tomorrow shifting all the pots around into their new locations. I wanted to make sure everything was in the proper place before I started, because it makes the work go so much smoother and quicker if I don't have to stop and make corrections along the way.
The last batch of seeds I planted are finally starting to sprout, glad to see that. I was afraid the 4 plus inches of rain we had right after I planted the seeds might wash dirt over them and get them too deep under the soil to sprout.
It is amazing I can grow anything at all in my garden beds, I finally broke down and sent off three soil samples from the three zones inside the fence. Those three zones run the length the fence on each side and the back of my back yard (the part that is fenced, not the bog and circular bed areas and the seedlings.)
Those three zones have sandy loam mostly with some slight spots of sandy clay occasionally mixed in. Really great soil to work with, so soft, now very few roots (since I dug out the crepe myrtle roots) and easy to dig. Not the best at holding moisture. But the tests showed the PH to be pretty far out of whack surprisingly, and the phosphorus to be very high in most cases, but with strange results of the beds in zone 2.
I had always thought of these three zones as probably being very nearly the same. Zones 1 and 3 were very similar in results but the ph in zone 3 was down to 4.9, the other two zones were also low at 5.1 and 5.2. However the Phosphorus, potassium, Magnesium, can calcium were extremely different in zone 2 from the other zones. That really surprised me. I feel sure that all the organic material I have added to those beds over the years have buffered the effects of the low PH and probably contributed to the high phosphorus. I have now started to add more lime each time I fertilize.
