Easy Gardening

If you’re purchasing your compost or manures (or even top soil) do be aware that herbicide residues do exist and can create conditions that restrict the growth of plants.

For example, aminopyralid is registered for a wide variety of crops and has created enough problems in the UK to have its registration pulled (technically Dow asked to have it pulled) Having said that, the residue does persist in manure and composts so if you purchase products with residues, you might see stunting and leaf curl on susceptible plants such as tomatoes.

This would be early in the season and not later. So as soon as the plant roots start to grow out of the starter media and expand into the soil, they’re going to do poorly. If you’re seeing later problems, it is something else. As a note, tomato seedlings are great starter plants for testing of almost any kind of herbicide residue – darn near anything will kill them and they’re a marker plant for that kind of testing. So if you’re not sure – try some tomato seedlings in new soils.

I was reminded of this problem this year because I brought a load of topsoil into the garden to build raised beds in our “cottage garden” area. The plants were moved in as mature plantings this spring. Simply dug and moved from the holding beds and not divided. They established quickly but quite frankly, haven’t grown as fast nor bloomed as much as I would have anticipated. There are, of course, a great many possibilities here but given the bulk of the plants were daylilies (as backbone plants) I would have expected more.

This is one more reason to produce your own compost and use it for compost tea to encourage micro-organism spread. Organic matter can be obtained from other things – from peat to leaves (it’s about time to go hunting for all the leaves nobody else wants) to purchasing straw.

In any case, it was a lesson remembered for me and I thought I’d pass it along.

This is one of the garden tips I pass along to subscribers. You can get a test subscription here to see if you like it.

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