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Entry Date
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Nick Name
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Location
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Saturday, March 06, 2010
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Big Kahuna 26
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Ontario, Canada.
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Entry 1 of 22 |
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LanTerra Update > Nothing like a nice sunny late winters day to bring out the very best in a gardener. The sky is so high today you can see for miles and miles. The birds are starting to return just as I have returned to the garden. I have welcomed the Jays and Chickadees all winter but it sure would be nice to spot a red breasted robin out there.
Today was a match in pushing the spring envelop to arrive much earlier than the calender suggests. I set fourth today and purchased a few things for some very early spring applications. Worried about my ever creeping and high pH problem I bought some aluminum sulphate.
After a brief trip around the edge of the patches with the snow blower to remove 18" of heavy wet snow. I ventured out to spread 2.2 Lbs of aluminum sulphate to white and reflective snowy covered parts of each thousand square foot growing area of patch # 3.
The sun was shinning brightly as the warmest air of the season to come (40*f) has me beaming with energy. Trudging ahead I step gingerly in snow drifts up to my waste. I have never before started spring patch work so early.
This season I am declaring a gardeners war on high pH water and soil conditions. All of my winters reading points to an extreme problem with calcium tie issues at LanTerra. Despite an over abundance of the diminutive dull gray element in my soil the plants just cannot seam to uptake enough of it. Soil tests confirm that LanTerra contains in excess of 7200 ppm of Ca but it remains tied up for the most part in insoluble compounds of bicarbonates.
My spray regime and tissue testing of the past several years suggest that no amount of topical foliar sprays of Ca work to alleviate the condition. So here I am at a cross roads, ever eager and ever enhanced with a winters worth of knowledge starting once again on another year of mega effort in the quest to grow the worlds largest pumpkin.
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