Complimentary Blueberry Juice

One thing becomes clear after reviewing the various challenges or crop failures I’ve had over the past few years. There is a common denominator, and that common denominator is an inattentiveness to plant nutrition.

For the most part I’m very lucky where the farm is, our clay soils are pretty good and if the weather is favourable things will generally work out. However there are many potential points of failure. I’ve run into those potential points of failure more times than I’d like to admit.

It’s important to feed your plants.

So for the 2025 season I want to put together a nutrition program that intends to inject nutrition or a biological at every possible stage of the plant’s life. It doesn’t mean that it will make all the plants fail-proof, but it can mean we have more resilient plants. For market gardening with 35-40 different crops, there can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution. The nightshades are going to have different needs than the brassicas, and so on.

What I can do is implement a new thought process that will demand ongoing attentiveness to this issue. So far in my thinking I’ve come up with a list of 7 important categories of places I can take a nutrition action:

seed planting
greenhouse soil mix
transplanting solutions
foliar applications
bed flips
fall soil amendments
cover crops

As an example, when we get to a transplanting day, and there’s plain old well water in the transplanter, I might have to ask myself “am I doing all I can to aid the plant nutritionally in this step” and, in this case, the answer would have to be “absolutely not.”

There will be a lot of trialling and experimenting, but what are we doing if we aren’t trying to learn new things or gain some insight? There’s still a couple months to do some reading and research.

I’m still excited about the (very) successful trials I ran last fall with calcium applications and those results have been the insight that has shown a much bigger path forward for a more total plant nutrition approach.

Graham

thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice