06/25/2012
Here's a simple way to grow tomatoes in soil or containers.
Instead of tilling every organic amendment you can think of into your garden plot, just get a pickup load of the oldest cow manure you can find. Till that into your soil at about 50%-50% in the Fall. You won't get much NPK food value, but you'll get the aeration and bio-activity. You'll have wonderfully conditioned soil ready for plants.
People use many different mixes in containers, from inert potting mixes to straight soil. Put some cow manure in there too.
From that point on, just feed with our liquid nutrients, by hand or with a drip system. This is the easiest and quickest way to get great results.
The reason we recommend against plowing a ton of organic amendments into your soil is because it's so easy to get "upside down". We've personally confirmed this with soil analysis from customer's gardens. What happens is.....without a scientific approach to what you are adding, you often times end up adding too much of some elements and not enough of others. This can really be a problem with micro nutrients. Next thing you know, you're toxic on boron, and you'll see chlorotic leaves and think you have a nutrient deficiency. Then you'll add more "stuff" to try to correct it, only making it worse.
Even with the average backyard gardener, we can't recommend enough the benefits of a soil analysis to know where your soil stands.
By using old cow manure, you are in no danger of overloading your soil with any one element, but you've just greatly increased the quality of your root zone. You can transform poor soils in this manner. From that point on you are in control of delivering nutrition.
Basically, this is manual hydroponics: your cow manure/soil mix is your growing medium, and you are manually supplying perfect nutrition by using our hydroponic-grade fertilizers.
