My 2009 garden review

As the calendar rolls over to September and the morning greets me with brisk temperatures I glance at our garden with no small bit of disappointment. Either my garden let me down this year or I let my garden down. There are so many things that can go wrong in a garden – watering, temperature, soil, fertilizing, etc. It’s hard to nail down just what is to blame for our lack of production, but I’ll take a guess that I didn’t add enough natural fertilizer to my raised beds this spring.

I’ll usually add a generous amount of our own compost and a healthy portion of composted cow manure to our raised beds. This spring I backed off a bit because I was concerned about too much nitrogen in the soil and I didn’t want to have a poor crop of tomatoes again this year. Well, I neglected to get a soil test to determine if my estimate was correct or not and I am wondering if a lack of proper fertilizer is the culprit for our low yield.

This is year two or three for the majority of our raised beds and there has been a significant drop off in production this year. I’m going to work in a good amount of compost, composted cow manure, and peat to the raised beds this fall and let that sit until I work the beds again next spring. I’ll definitely be getting the soil tested next spring .

Related posts:

1. RaNdOm ThOuGhTs from the Garden
2. Quick and Easy Garden Makeover
3. Some lazy days in the garden
4. Square Foot Gardening Book
5. Received some happy mail for the garden today

Tagged as: garden, garden produce yield, Gardening, gardening in michigan