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Old July 24, 2016   #8
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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It's a wierd scene for me this year, with everything arriving in the wrong order and late. Wrong mix for containers, late and a LOT of it. No funds for alternatives at the time. The only amendment I had at the time of planting was bone meal and a scanty bit of kelp. Afterwards we went and got kelp, someone brought me a pickup load of nicely composted horse manure, I got a big bag of chicken manure pellets 5-4-3 and had several buckets of shrimp shell gifted to me as well. So all of the things I would have used before planting came afterwards.
I had a small amount of perlite and compost that I mixed and dug as deeply around the roots as i could when the plants started having vascular distress problems. And made some kelp drinks for them. After that I top dressed with a mixture of the composted horse manure (full of worms!) and crushed kelp. That seems to have helped some with the compaction issue by acting as a mulch. About ten days ago I scratched some of the chicken manure pellets into the top and also watered with some dilute molasses for extra K. They seem to be loving it and flowering and setting nicely, but exactly as mentioned, soon enough these little white roots appeared on the surface in patches, everywhere the chicken stuff was scratched.
Soo... I'm going to try to melt down the chicken stuff in water, add some dissolved molasses for extra K, and try watering it down into the deeps, maybe apply liquid ferts followed by water?
I also thought about using a skewer to poke some holes and then apply ferts into that? Not sure if the dry manure would burn roots, maybe apply wet into the holes?

Maybe I should do both, make it a proper experiment.

I'm glad tomatoes don't last for years... all I have to do is coax a crop out of them this summer by constant disaster management. Worry about next year later.
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