Yellowing grass tips
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You can get an Autumn lawn feed, which you can apply up to November.
Andy
Andy
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J
johnheritage
There are two really important things for plants.
pH and nutrient level.
By important I mean, the plants will go yellow or die if they're wrong.
You can't judge that based on plants already growing in the soil, as some are very hardy and others can't take it.
Cannabis growers are always going on about these two things.
pH HAS to be below 7 and can go down to about 5.5 (acidic). If it's towards 7 or over it, the nutrients in the soil change to an insoluble form, and the plants can't suck them up. If it's below 5.5, it'll osmotically kill the plants.
The pH depends quite a lot on the colour of the plants. For plants with very bright petals (flowers), especially dark blues or purples, a pH closer to 5.5 is best. For leafy green plants, something more like 6 would be good.
Those test kits from the garden centres are absolutely rubbish, and far too expensive. Go on eBay and search for "pH pool" and you can buy cheap, digital, reusable meters.
Next up, the nutrient level. You can get digital sticks for testing that as well. Search for "nutrient wand" / "nutrient stick" and so on. Cannabis growers will constantly try to push more and more nutrient into the plants. Having too little means they don't grow properly and having too much burns the leaves (sometimes quite dramatically). The levels are read in ppm (parts per million of dissolved nutrient). Most of them can manage up to around 900 - 1200 before the plants burn, but those are often selected, hardy plants.
To use both of these, go round the garden and randomly dig up a spoon fulls worth of soil from a few places and depths. Put it all in a glass, add enough water to cover it and then a bit extra, give it a stir and let it sit for a few hours. Dip the wands in and it'll they'll tell you if something is wrong.
I'll give you an example, my garden. Soil is massively clay heavy (a builder thought it was actually concrete in the summer). Clay buster is usually alkaline.
I took samples and discovered the pH was MILES away at 8.5.
I then sampled the nutrient level and found it was barely even reading 50 - 100ppm on the stick, never mind 900.
The alkaline soil is due to the builders, in 1920, using clinker from an iron works as hardcore, which is the slag from a blast furnace, brought the surface by pouring lime (strongly alkaline) into the molten metal.
To try and break the soil up, I bought huge bags of saw dust from the local timber yard and churned it into the ground with a rotovator. These were waist height bags. And I used three or five of them on fairly small garden, and it could still do with some more.
I began raising the nutrient levels by using none branded feeds, e.g. chicken poo (which is rich in nitrogen, the thing that plants need to make chlorophyll, green).
For the pH, this is a trickier one to explain.
Do not buy "pH down", it is way, way too expensive for what it is (it's like bottled water in terms of the mark up).
I used a.) flowers of sulphur / sulphur powder b.) battery acid (sulphuric).
Sulphur powder gradually converts to sulphuric and lowers the pH over months / years.
Sulphuric acid is already acidic (very acidic) and dissolved.
The sulphuric acid needs A LOT more care to work with to avoid killing the plants, as it needs diluting down and sprinkling on or going in a hose feeder. It's far better to just apply a little, very dilute, and every now and again, and watch the plants and pH. The powder, a fire and forget method works fine.
The problem with garden pH is that there is a HUGE amount of soil there, and you're trying to make a very precise pH change. Say I measure the pH, work out how much sulphuric it'll take to drive it only slightly acidic, then add it, the pH WILL go back up towards 7 over the months / years because it takes a vast amount of time for it to stabilize and neutralize all the things that don't show up on the pH test (e.g. undissolved solids).
Salt is another problem, but quite a lot harder to fix. One way is to wash it out with huge amounts of watering. Another is to infect the garden with mycorrhizal fungi. Some form of it lives on the roots of 80% of plants and they symbiotically exchange nutrients (the plant gives the fungi sugar, the fungi gives the plants insoluble nutrients from the soil). That helps the plants access 'locked' nutrients and it also increases their tolerance to salt.
Whatever you think of drugs, cannabis growers are often exceptionally good gardeners and they should have one on Gardener's Question Time, if one hasn't already sneaked on there (Dermot? Pippa?).
Forums like Roll it Up are a gold mine of gardening advice and stoned guys eating packs of biscuits, willing to help you out.
pH and nutrient level.
By important I mean, the plants will go yellow or die if they're wrong.
You can't judge that based on plants already growing in the soil, as some are very hardy and others can't take it.
Cannabis growers are always going on about these two things.
pH HAS to be below 7 and can go down to about 5.5 (acidic). If it's towards 7 or over it, the nutrients in the soil change to an insoluble form, and the plants can't suck them up. If it's below 5.5, it'll osmotically kill the plants.
The pH depends quite a lot on the colour of the plants. For plants with very bright petals (flowers), especially dark blues or purples, a pH closer to 5.5 is best. For leafy green plants, something more like 6 would be good.
Those test kits from the garden centres are absolutely rubbish, and far too expensive. Go on eBay and search for "pH pool" and you can buy cheap, digital, reusable meters.
Next up, the nutrient level. You can get digital sticks for testing that as well. Search for "nutrient wand" / "nutrient stick" and so on. Cannabis growers will constantly try to push more and more nutrient into the plants. Having too little means they don't grow properly and having too much burns the leaves (sometimes quite dramatically). The levels are read in ppm (parts per million of dissolved nutrient). Most of them can manage up to around 900 - 1200 before the plants burn, but those are often selected, hardy plants.
To use both of these, go round the garden and randomly dig up a spoon fulls worth of soil from a few places and depths. Put it all in a glass, add enough water to cover it and then a bit extra, give it a stir and let it sit for a few hours. Dip the wands in and it'll they'll tell you if something is wrong.
I'll give you an example, my garden. Soil is massively clay heavy (a builder thought it was actually concrete in the summer). Clay buster is usually alkaline.
I took samples and discovered the pH was MILES away at 8.5.
I then sampled the nutrient level and found it was barely even reading 50 - 100ppm on the stick, never mind 900.
The alkaline soil is due to the builders, in 1920, using clinker from an iron works as hardcore, which is the slag from a blast furnace, brought the surface by pouring lime (strongly alkaline) into the molten metal.
To try and break the soil up, I bought huge bags of saw dust from the local timber yard and churned it into the ground with a rotovator. These were waist height bags. And I used three or five of them on fairly small garden, and it could still do with some more.
I began raising the nutrient levels by using none branded feeds, e.g. chicken poo (which is rich in nitrogen, the thing that plants need to make chlorophyll, green).
For the pH, this is a trickier one to explain.
Do not buy "pH down", it is way, way too expensive for what it is (it's like bottled water in terms of the mark up).
I used a.) flowers of sulphur / sulphur powder b.) battery acid (sulphuric).
Sulphur powder gradually converts to sulphuric and lowers the pH over months / years.
Sulphuric acid is already acidic (very acidic) and dissolved.
The sulphuric acid needs A LOT more care to work with to avoid killing the plants, as it needs diluting down and sprinkling on or going in a hose feeder. It's far better to just apply a little, very dilute, and every now and again, and watch the plants and pH. The powder, a fire and forget method works fine.
The problem with garden pH is that there is a HUGE amount of soil there, and you're trying to make a very precise pH change. Say I measure the pH, work out how much sulphuric it'll take to drive it only slightly acidic, then add it, the pH WILL go back up towards 7 over the months / years because it takes a vast amount of time for it to stabilize and neutralize all the things that don't show up on the pH test (e.g. undissolved solids).
Salt is another problem, but quite a lot harder to fix. One way is to wash it out with huge amounts of watering. Another is to infect the garden with mycorrhizal fungi. Some form of it lives on the roots of 80% of plants and they symbiotically exchange nutrients (the plant gives the fungi sugar, the fungi gives the plants insoluble nutrients from the soil). That helps the plants access 'locked' nutrients and it also increases their tolerance to salt.
Whatever you think of drugs, cannabis growers are often exceptionally good gardeners and they should have one on Gardener's Question Time, if one hasn't already sneaked on there (Dermot? Pippa?).
Forums like Roll it Up are a gold mine of gardening advice and stoned guys eating packs of biscuits, willing to help you out.
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WOW!!!!!!
....awsome post, I even understand it, Thanks john
....awsome post, I even understand it, Thanks john
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