I’m sorry to interrupt. As far as I know, ‘big leaves, little fruit’ can be a sign of to much fertilizer. But probably not always?
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http://www.permies.com/t/26116/permaculture/Heavy-Clay-Soil
There may be some help in these permaculture discussion threads, esp. re species lists of plants which will do the work of that digging fork, or broadfork. Sheet mulching or sheet composting…
… often saves a bit of wear and tear on one’s body, and results in a longer-lasting solution to poor soil structure in heavy clay. Plant seedlings or seeds in the topmost layer of compost, then mulch as usual with straw/leaves/etc. Water it all in, step back and watch the magic happen.
Getting a lot of humus into or on to your plot will have a lasting benefit for heavy clay’s soil structure. You can buy liquid humus, or just grow a lot of green cover crops (clover, peas, consult the species lists mentioned in the above links) and chop-and-drop to build humus up, in place. Compost tea can restore the soil-food web and thus give your soil better crumb.
I’ve worked heavy clay in Missouri and Texas. I hear you. I’ve tried mixing in perlite, gypsum, many truckloads of composted manure from nearly every kind of domesticated animal in the U.S. except pigs, various kinds of rock dusts (basalts, granites), “poultry meal,” organic cotton burr (cottonseed hulls) and more. At some point, digging down seemed heavier and harder and less satisfying than building up (not to be confused with a raised bed–this is not!) and inoculating the works with mycorrhizae as a fail-safe.
Tomorrow, I have more chop and drop to do. The Austrian winter peas, hairy vetch, red clover, and alfalfa will be cut with a billhook and laid atop the soil surface. I’ve got butternut squash “starts” (they are sprouting in my compost pile) to transplant, and a lot of black-eyed peas to generate my summer yield of biomass. Cycling nutrients helps keep my purchases of fertilizer low.
Good luck!
ETA: forgot to mention nutrient cycling… time for bed! G’night y’all.
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Too much nitrogen, usually. That’s the first number of the N-P-K ratio printed on the bag (if there is one) of fertilizer.
Phosphorus is responsible for supporting flowering and fruiting.
Potassium is the one of the more important nutrients once the plant has set fruit, in this case, tomatoes. Potassium also plays a key role in how efficiently a plant will be able to use the water it gets.
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Not really, we just have to finish the kitchen before we tackle a two-weekend project in the back yard. Seeing as we will be finishing installing the tile tomorrow and possibly starting grout Sunday, we’re still a few weeks from being able to call the countertop people. We might still pull it off, but I’m not liking the idea of waiting until the end of May to get plants in the dirt.
On va voir.
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Too much nitrogen. The npk for fertilizer should favor nitrogen during initial growth, and a foliar spray with almost no nitrogen about halfway through the season.
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Our lot is .11 Ac. I suspect we’d be really unpopular with the neighbors if we brought in that much poop. 
Frankly, we’re tired of renting a tiller every year, so raised beds it is. Somewhere upthread is a pic of the one we built last year. As I was commiserating with @Stynx, we should be building at least two more this spring.
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Heh, I shoulda read beyond the one post. Beat me to it 
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Btw, I accidentally built my beds almost exactly like the image you posted. It is incredible how few weeds and volunteers there are. A lot of the invasive stuff round my house has running roots, so the cardboard barrier is a godsend.
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Yep.
Reading those fertilizer labels, recognizing which nutrients the plants need, when they need those, and what nutrients tend to get locked up in the soil you’re working with is something of an art. And funny low numbers are deceptive too, because this is one very useful foliar feed:
http://www.maxicrop.com/pages/application_guidelines.html
(where I garden now, I use a lot of Maxicrop Plus Iron)
Safe enough to use every week. Micronutrients are macro-important.
Crush up a cheap B-complex vitamin in a 5-gallon bucket of water, and use as a soil drench to increase heat and cold tolerance.
Fish emulsions work ok in the spring, when a lot of N is just the ticket, or on citrus all the dang time–those plants are crazy hungry. (I hear it’s the same for avocado trees too.)
Organic gardeners have even more homework than that, because application timelines are stretched longer–organics take a while longer to get metabolized by the soil microbes before plants can avail themselves of the nutrients. Chemical fertilizers get faster results but destabilize soil structure and soil biology, which then means more tillage/forking/etc. to get air and crumb back. That’s a treadmill from hell, and it gets harder and harder to buy your way off it the longer you run.
So yeah @japhroaig has it right, foliar feeding (spraying good stuff on leaves) is often an excellent way to bypass both the issues of nutrients binding up in soil (chemistry! oy vey!) and that need for fast results using organics.
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I should go feed the orange tree outside my window. It produced incredible oranges, better than any I’ve bought.
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Last year, in the two months leading up to my closing on the house, I was worried the neighbors would call the cops on me for stalking the property. I didn’t own it, but the owner was in Florida (and we’d never meet anyway), and it was February, and all the beds around the house were overgrown with weeds and old, rotten wood planks used for building some beds. The whole thing was pregnant, literally and figuratively, and I couldn’t legally touch a thing. Horrible!
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Beautiful graphic and excellent information–thanks! I’m doing some of the things you mention, crop rotation, every non-weed goes back into the compost pile, I build a new compost pile on soon-to-be garden beds so that when they’re finally in use, all that compost goodness has leached into the soil (as well as being added to the garden as a whole).
I’ve actually been doing somewhat of a hugelkulture on a smaller scale as well, although I didn’t know that was a thing. The property had an old, dead apple tree in the back bed that I chopped and pulled up. I’ve used the branches as the bottom layer for new compost piles, as reinforcement in the soil under concrete steps, and now I’m thinking I’ll put some bigger pieces into a recently dug bed…
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I’ve had good results with
http://www.groworganic.com/dte-citrus-mix-fertilizer-633-5-lb.html
and
especially desirable results with this
http://www.espoma.com/product/citrus-tone/
though it’s getting hard to find around CenTex and I try hard to keep my expenditures local.
Epsoma is the shit, totally.
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gaaaaaah!
Kudos on your self-control. I’d be going nuts on the inside too.
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I’ve had some luck rotting or maybe fermenting stubborn weeds into submission. A bucket of water, the baddest of the bad ones go in, and I wait until their seeds are partially dissolved. Doesn’t smell too good but often doesn’t take too long, be sure to put a piece of window screen over it to keep out the mosquitoes. I pour the works on the compost pile (which never gets that hot because I short it on water during droughts). That’s one way to get the weeds’ biomass neutralized and back in the loop. Those weeds pull some serious nutrients out of the soil and I want those back!
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I am not sure what all I am growing…
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I tried vermicomposting my kitchen scraps for a couple years (not too much heat or rot with that approach) and, like, half the stuff I threw out from the kitchen seemed to end up sprouting. Pepper seeds would sprout, scallions would put forth new leaves - it was like someone detonated a genesis device in there. When an apple’s seeds spouted, the kids insisted on planting one of them. We grew it in a container, which is probably less than ideal for an apple tree, but it was still alive several years later when we moved
My son was pretty bummed when we had to leave it behind, but the rules for bringing living plants into Canada seemed to preclude bringing it with us
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Depending on your (now shifting) hardiness zone, end May is still doable. Most plants don’t mind later even. But apart from that, I really understand you.
This weekend the marrowfat peas and the last broad beans seedlings need to go in the ground. Same with the peas.
The red Brussels sprout really need to be re potted. Other plants need to be sown.
And than the house, lots of work also. Stripped down completely, rebuilding now. First finished, mostly (probably permanently mostly) the attic.
(Darn, want to reply to more peeps, but need to go packing, fast vacuum-clean round, some feeding and 3 hour drive)
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I haven’t rebuilt my old vermicontraption, but I did love using that method. “Genesis device” is totally accurate, too. Never threw an avocado pit in there that didn’t sprout. And all the compost coming out of there is like black gold. But best of all is getting to dig your hand into a giant seething mass of hungry redworms …
BTW, would you do this even with Ivy? I’ve got that stuff here and there, among a few other persistent weeds (that being the main one).
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Wow, I can barely even keep Hedera spp alive over here. They all fry by the end of June. I’ve worked in offices where my fellow workers have killed it indoors. My folks loved their patch of it at their house in Missouri because they believed it kept erosion at bay on a steep slope.
As I recall most of those ivies (assuming here it’s Hedera) love rooting in water and they are really woody, so they won’t dissolve right away. Rotting them in a bucket thing won’t work. A super hot compost pile (one that perhaps you can get a few people to pee on, in the dark, quietly, every few days, for several weeks) would probably do it. You could dig it up and let it wither completely on a hot asphalt or driveway or parking space. Once you can get a brisk brittle snap, with the woody vine breaking cleanly like a wooden matchstick, it’s dead enough for the compost, IMO.
Experts warn against composting the vines, apparently–but they probably mean fresh viable vines. If you end up hitting it with a lot of vinegar spray as that article suggests, it’ll probably imbalance a compost pile pretty quickly unless… eh ah… feeling shaky on the soil chemistry here… you add a few pinches of ashes from a burned wood campfire to bring pH back to neutral?
Dang, the English [ivies] have really attacted the U.S. something fierce:
https://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/hehe1.htm
Kudzu in the south, Hedera on the east and west coasts… not great news.
I guess if it were me, I’d dig it up, pull it up, bag it up and give it to the City of Austin’s “Resource Recovery” (formerly known as “Solid Waste Services”) own composting program. If your town doesn’t have such, and it’s a hassle to wither it before composting, it may have to go to the landfill… or… you could… kill it… with fire. Mwah ha ha haaaaa.
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