Until the Cucumber Beetle struck. It struck and it ate my bush zucchini and was all over every other plant in the garden before I knew it. I was squishing them by hand at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d cover every plant, including the entire forest of pole beans and the fiercely indeterminate Roma plant that seems to be obsessed with forming the densest tomato plant ever grown inside it’s cage, but refuses to grow upwards.

Perusing the forums I frequent, I saw an article about making your garden an inviting place for a toad to live. Toad? Why toads? Well, toads eat three times their weight in bugs, grubs, ants and worms a day. I have a giant population of bugs, grubs, ants, and worms. There’s also a giant population of toads in my neighborhood, which has a wonderful wooded creek running through it. It seems that I practically squish a dozen any time Henry and I go jogging.

Yesterday, I grabbed the broken pot that I was about to pitch and put it in the garden. I also sunk a tupperware container into the mulch/compost so that some of the water would stay in there on days that I didn’t water.

a Toad Home -- complete with water feature and damp compost to burrow in!

Then I went toad hunting! It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was coax the toad into a tupperware with a cracked screw-on lid. He tried his best to escape, but I quickly ran him through the house (the dogs, of course, were fascinated) and let him loose in the back of the garden.

I noticed an immediate reduction (if not outright elimination) of the Cucumber Beetle in particular. I haven’t had to squish one of the nasty buggers ever since I let the little guy out of the toad catcher.

And frankly, I haven’t seen the toad since, but as long as the bug population stays low, I know he’s doing his job!

My first suspicion was a squash vine borer. I had several bush zucchini plants grow like mad for a week or two, and then suddenly wilt and die.

Damage to the squash plants, which wilted from the base up.

I did find a spotted cucumber beetle in the yard, which might be the culprit. Sorry about the blurriness of this picture, it’s a little bug and I had a wide angle lens on when I managed to capture him.

Spotted Cucumber Beetle

I killed all the ones that I found, and despite some slug-like trails on the peas and eggplant, I haven’t seen any other bugs that would be the culprit. (The bugs *and* all the tender parts of the kohlrabi…) A necropsy on the dead squash revealed no signs of squash vine borers, larvae, or other varmints… the plantS just up and died. Worse: The luffa seedlings are now showing the same signs of wilt. There’s this article on Bacterial Wilt, which seems to match. So, it looks like I’m not going to have luffa this year … damn…

Now, on the surviving Bush Champion cucumber, I’m getting similar slug trails — up the stem, even. And then I found a cucumber beetle inside the first flower earlier today. (He got squished.) A careful going-over of the plant revealed no more — I checked the other plants just to be sure.

Cuke Damage -- Note the scarring in the bottom right.

The problem is that the damage to the leaves doesn’t match what the cucumber beetle seems to do… although it might be for the pupae. However, I’m going to hit up the co-op tomorrow and see if they have any Rotenone, which is an approved organic pesticide to control these beetles.

Gory details of how much Organic gardening makes Scott’s & Co shudder over at Garden Rant.

So when I went to buy mulch for the front beds today, I was faced with a hard choice. They were almost out of Cypress mulch, and if I beat a couple of old ladies away from the pile with my very large flat cart, I could probably get enough.

But they had plenty of eucalyptus mulch.

I was buying a bunch of things, including new CF bulbs for my hobby/sewing room and caulk to seal up some splits in the hardi-plank, and *still* haven’t looked at the receipt to see how much the price difference was.

In case you missed them, here’s Part One and Part Two.

One of the things I had sitting around taking up space was my leftover organic seed starter mix. There wasn’t an assay on the side of the container, so I figured I’d see what’s in it. I followed the same steps from last time.

Mix with distilled water and let it settle...

Here’s the pH results. The interesting thing wasn’t necessarily the results (which are hard to read because I didn’t use my flash) but what happened about twenty minutes AFTER I got my results.

Initial pH results

... And 20 minutes later...

… there’s that much variance? That’s a pretty clear 6 to 5.5 at the top and bottom, with the regular ol’ 7 in the middle. Weird. I don’t have any chemistry experience whatsoever, but with a neutral result, I’d expect it to STAY neutral.

Moving on, here’s the NPK results. Pretty much the same as my garden soil (which is VERY different stuff — it’s a sandy loam from a nursery mixed with horse manure, as opposed to the peat seed starter mix.)

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium

Frankly, I’m not surprised that I got the same results. As anyone who went through seventh grade chemistry in a reasonably good school system can tell you, the most important things in science experiments are studying a large enough sample to be sure of your results and having control over as many variables as possible. In this case, the test is sampling less than a thimble full of material that’s been mixed with water, and it’s using a relatively inexact amount of material to do so. Here’s a shot of what was left over on my counter top after I finished testing the above.

What remains...

And you’re going to tell me that the results won’t be skewed based on how careful I was cutting open the little pill? Right. I thought, when I looked at the package from the outside, that the pill jacket would dissolve in water and deliver the proper amount of whatever magic powder was inside. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and even the directions say that you have to cut the capsule open. I already tried cutting it’s top off inside the little test chamber, and I made an even bigger mess than what you see above. I also tried emptying it out onto another container that I could use to funnel it all into the test chamber, also making a big mess. It’d be much better if the magic test powder was easy to transfer to the test chamber … of course, that implies that the tests were accurate in the first place.

About that control thing: I happen to have a few substances where the amounts of the various nutrients are able to be measured reliably. Next time I post on this topic, we’ll take a look at the results from a few of those. And by that time, my soil tests should be back from the testing lab at Texas A&M University.

First, the pH test. pH stands for Potential Hydrogen, and is a measure of how acidic your soil is. Some plants like an acidic soil, some plants I took a small scoop of soil, got it down to the right size, added enough distilled water to get to the top line, and wrestled with the little capsule until I got most of the powder into the test container.

A few shakes later and — yep, neutral pH. Since the soil and compost were trucked in, this isn’t surprising in the least.

pH test of my garden soil

The next step is to take a larger sample and test the chemical contents of it. As a refresher course, we’re looking for Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus, which make up the three essential nutrients for plants.

The testing process is similar. After mixing the dirt and distilled water, I let it settle for more than 24 hours (About 30 hours total, to be precise) and then used the super-scientific pipette to transfer some of the clearer liquid from the container to the test containers. Then mix some of the mystery powder with the sample, and shake, and you should have your results.

And, if I may have a drumroll please, the results…

... the results make absolutely no sense.

… make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Let’s remember what went into this dirt. First, we have two cubic yards of composted horse manure. It was mixed well with another two cubic yards or so of sandy riverbed loam — rich in sediments. Both are chock full of biologicals. Decomposed biologicals are the primary source of nitrogen. So how is this dirt deficient in nitrogen again?

I’ve got plenty of faults with the experimental protocol here. It’s SIMILAR to the process that would be used in an actual soil lab, but the controls are a bit… abstracted, and there’s a bunch of places for “user error” to affect the results. The sample size is decidedly too small for the pH test. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Stay tuned for part three, in which I call “bullshit” on the results and start testing other stuff.

No, I’m not kidding, unfortunately. I live in a new housing community. It’s three years old. There are no trees. I use a recycling/mulching lawnmower. The only thing I harvest that gives me lots of dead material is weeds, and those don’t really make good mulch because of their zombie-like tendency to come back to life in the most improbable of places. Other than food compost, I don’t have much left to put in the garden to help refresh it!

What else is a gardener to do? Any other ideas?

I don’t want to foreshadow too much, but this got a bit interesting, so I’ve split the article into four parts. Today I’ll talk about the process. The next post will reveal the results of my raised bed. After that, I’ll post some quick reviews of the various OTHER things that I tested to see what the results were.

The kit's cover

The first thing I tested, of course, was the soil from my own garden. There are two processes for this kit — one for pH, the other for the three main elements that are important to the cycle of life that all plants follow.

For tools, they give you a very sophisticated set of containers, a bunch of gelatin capsules like the kind you get pills in, and a very scientific pipette.

Testing Containers

The first is a pH test (Potential Hydrogen), which reveals whether or not your soil is acidic or alkaline. This is one of the most basic requirements for plant growth — if your dirt is too acidic or too alkaline, you’ll burn the roots and/or stunt the growth of the plant. Most plants (and people) are happy with a neutral pH, but some plants are happiest with an acidic pH. The pH test was simple. Mix a sample of dirt of X size with some distilled water and the contents of a capsule, shake well, and let settle.

The other three tests call for a specific sampling and mixing process. The directions call for mixing one part soil with five parts distilled water, and then let the water settle until it’s clear. For soils with lots of clay content (that would be me they’re talking to), it’s recommended to let things settle for up to 24 hours.

I see murky things.

Ah, but this is interesting. After letting it settle overnight, it was still pretty murky. The directions said to let it settle almost to clear, but I figured I’d go ahead and run the tests because it had already been sitting for upwards of 24 hours.

I suppose it's a bit clearer...

And here’s the cliffhanger … to be continued — click through to Part 2.

Update: Unfortunately, the cliffhanger’s going to have to be prolonged until my MacBook Pro comes back from Applecare. It got shipped off yesterday, and I should have it back in my hands sometime next week. I hope. Sorry for the delay. Everything’s backed up, I just can’t access the photos in my Aperture library on the backup without another Mac.

I might not have gotten anything done, but the seedlings sure were growing in the meantime. The annuals I planted in the second batch… some of them got HUGE while I wasn’t looking.

That's some good growing!

But wait… what’s that? Is that the romaine and Kohlrabi? Hmn, they did look a little tall/long in the last one … yes, I’ve propped them up with twist-ties to keep them from bending until they break due to their top-heavy weight. One of them broke off at the base before I did this.

Each seedling is at least four inches tall.

After a little googling around, it turns out I made a newbie error for a first time seed sprouter: I planted seeds in leftover potting mix from last year instead of plunking down the cash on sprouting mix. Oops. I’ll be sure to rectify that for the next tray of seedlings.

The tomatoes don’t seem to be too perturbed by it, and the greenbeans (the REALLY tall ones) are supposed to get tall very quickly anyway. They’re supposed to start producing fruit 55 days from planting and should indeed be one of my first fruiting veggies — I’d planned to transplant them into some larger containers this coming weekend anyway.

In the meantime, according to the internets, I can *try* to save these guys by immediately transplanting them, and planting them *DEEP* into some regular garden soil. I’ve got more than enough of that… but I’m going to be sure to test it to make sure that nitrogen’s within an allowable range before I do. That’ll be a chore for this weekend.