What's in your garden?

[cletus1]

Been trying to detox my garden...all is amiss. Except for the deep rooted perennials like the roses and dail lilies and mint and matjilia, yet still flowerless, the entire garden bed reacted terribly to being mulched with straw. I'm not sure why. The soil was tired and no longer producing much. Much of it was clay. So, last fall I layered on horse manure, coffee grinds and egg shells and a very heavy layer of straw. Over the winter, I assiduously dug that in, amending all the clay soil and loosening it up. There is still a lot of straw on top. I also dug in whatever yard compost was around, but it acts poisoned. Nothing survives...everything shrivels up and dies. When I pull them out and look at them their root balls are the same as when I planted them. Their leaves become pale and the stalks wild and wither over like it's a toxic site. Weird. I have taken to watering every day to help flush what ever is in there out. I went and got about 40 pounds of top soil and dumped it all over and dug it in around the plants that are dying and some just straight replanted, and watered again...I don't know what the problem is, but I've never had a garden problem like this one.

I'm going to out on a limb here and blame the horse manure. Too much of any fertlizer is bad. You most likely burned everything. JMO

Clete needs to chime in on this. He is the sh...I mean fertilizer expert.

I don't agree. Something else at play here.

The Grants Pass fairgrounds uses copious amounts of hose manure in all their planting beds because it will not burn (over nitrogen) plants, plus its free from all the stalls. You would need to plant your starts in fresh cow manure for them to burn or be stunted by excess nitrogen. I agree with Siskiyou, something else is amiss in your garden. I suspect that one of your boyfriends is purposely poisoning the site to get you out of the garden and into the bedroom.