First garden - poor quantity

[GAGLOCK]

A good book related to survival gardening is Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series). I give it mixed reviews. It is not a one stop gardening bible but there are nuggets of info in here you won't find anywhere else. In fact the author comes off to me as a NWest vegan peak oil hippie on medicinal maryjane. So if you can ignore all that you will prob learn something useful.

http://www.amazon.com/Gardening-When...2784071&sr=1-1

[jrain]

Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. It helps. I have read the same about calcium. Lime is calcium carbonate. Applications of lime will raise the soil ph although is works slowly and takes some pretty large quantities to raise one point. To add calcium without raising ph, you can apply gypsum. If I remember correctly, most crops prefer ph in the 6-7.5 range.

[crossbow]

about lime http://www.allotment.org.uk/fertilizer/garden-lime.php

[LizardKing]

I made my first attempt at growing a garden this spring and it was a miserable failure. I decided to try it like it would be if SHTF and went with no soil prep or chemicals. Most of my yard is pumped out lake bottom from the 50's and hard as rock in most places. I planted tight to see if it could support them. First the temp was too low for anything to germinate and then it seemed like it went to the 90's and completely stopped raining. The only thing that produced was the corn. Tomatoes didn't set much of anything, squash had those damn squash bugs running all over it, the eggplants never flowered, but they are still alive despite being neglected. I'm going to try again with fall crops and use chemicals this time. I like the idea of storing some fertilizer and bug killers.