Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
Short version is that the area that definitely got the most compost is outperforming other parts of the garden by a wide margin.
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See pic above, paying particular attention to the climbing cukes on the trellises and to the height of the tomato plants. The area to the left is where the largest and oldest compost piles sat for the longest. Also, when it came time to spread it all over the garden, after a good bit of work I felt like I had "enough" compost spread out when I had a good 3-4 inches everywhere. The area to the left being where the larger piles were and being downhill, I was able to leave much of the compost in place or simply spread it in the immediate vicinity of the original piles, making it have a much thicker layer in that area. I removed the spinach a few days ago (far left of the pic, just to the left of the last tomato on the left) and transplanted a dozen or so basil plants. Out of curiosity, I dug one hole much deeper than was necessary, and it turns out that the dirt there is dark black heavily-if-not-all-compost for around a foot deep! I was using a small trowel, and every single stroke of it brought out at least one extra-large earthworm, often more. That area is clearly brimming with rich, organic matter, and the growth is reflecting it. Again, it's not like the area to the right has bad soil, either: we're talking 3-4 inches of compost this year, plus the improvements I did to it last year. But the cucumbers on the left (same varieties) are already topping the trellis, while the ones on the right are only around halfway up, and the tomato plants (little harder to tell in the pic) on the left are several inches higher than the 6-foot privacy fence already. The ones on the right ain't bad at 5ish feet, but the ones to the left are just blowing them away height-wise, bushy-ness, and (so far) tomato production.
Another endorsement of how much soil quality matters would be my kids' gardens vs. the main garden. The little gardens were a last-minute add, after I'd already spread my compost, but SWMBO insisted that we must make sure that their gardens did well. So since those gardens are small, I just bought enough high-quality organic soil and compost to fill them to around 8 inches deep. The most obvious comparison would be the broccoli, because we transplanted it into my youngest's garden and mine literally minutes apart. They were the same size and the seeds had been sown on the same day. When we harvested the LARGE head below from hers on 5/17, no heads had even *started* to form in my garden yet, meanwhile we harvested one, and all three other broccoli plants in hers had formed heads. The broccoli pictured a few posts ago on 6/3 was the first to come from my garden.
