It looks like some products can be purchased without fear of sludge contamination.

I bought bagged “MooDoo” composted cow manure for years, until I got frightened of almost all bagged soil amendments. I looked them up , and the MooDoo company https://www.vermontnaturalagproducts.com/about/ pledges no sludge in their products, which are intended for organic gardeners. Coast of Maine products, even though they no longer say “no biosolids” on their packaging, says on their website they do not contain sludge either. https://coastofmaine.com/pages/faqs

If products are OMRI listed or say they follow the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) standards, they are not allowed to contain sludge. This is a relief. It can be hard to find local farmers selling manure. Or, when they do, sometimes it is fresh and stinky. Although despite this, I still recommend going to the farmer directly to help keep them in business and develop a relationship so you will be first in line to buy the food he produces if/when supplies become tight. Ask around at the farmers markets to find someone who might sell you manure or manure mixed with animal bedding.

Getting the pH right for what you are planting

I encouraged readers to dig up dirt from forested areas. But I forgot to warn that this is likely to be very acidic, so you will need to add lime or ashes from your woodstove to get the pH up to 6-7 for most of what you want to grow. I use bits of pH paper and mix small, fixed amounts of lime with soil—like 1/4 tsp lime mixed with 1 cup of soil and a little neutral water, check pH, and slowly add more lime till you reach the pH you desire. Then you calculate your soil to lime ratio so you know how much lime to add. If you are using a slow release lime you might want to leave it over night. Read the label.

Blueberries love acid soil (pH 4.5-5) and I mulched them with loads of pine needles I swept off the driveway and it seems to keep them sour (acidic) yet vigorous.

Unfortunately, you do have to successfully fight off the critters with cages if you want to harvest fruit.

The deer like to munch the fresh tips of young blueberry branches, perhaps before there are a lot of other things to eat, so I cage the bushes early for the deer, and the cages protect the berries from the deer, squirrels and birds later in the season when the berries appear—or I would have no berries.

Below are some options. Using a tomatoe cage for a frame for netting only works when the berry bushes are small.

Below is what my hoops looked like, mainly used for row cover, though I added some rebar inside the tube ends for stability in the soil, as they tend to fall sideways. You can attach netting to them with clothespins, and metal garden staples will secure netting or row cover in the ground. This could work for blueberries, but deer could knock the structure down.

Below is an attractive cage.

You don’t need to cage raspberries with netting until the fruit appears. The deer have not tried eating new raspberry branches. Nor have the squirrels gone after the raspberries.

Netting is cheap but must be attached tightly to the ground to keep out birds. It can be difficult to remove once the raspbettery branches have grown into it. Fine wire cages are more expensive, but you only need to buy them once. And the animals cannot chew through them. I used what is called “hardware cloth” to make circular cages, attaching cheap plastic netting to the top with clothespins.

This is the first year the deer chowed down on my chives. They must have been very hungry. It was a long winter. Luckily they missed the echinacea (purple coneflower) plants that were just emerging from the soil, which they seem to love.

This weekend I was tidying up in Maine and now am back in NH. The turkeys were out on my street in Maine Friday, and today I saw a fox in my backyard in NH. This is how we get our thrills living in the country.

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More