Used tea leaves, egg shells, and coffee grounds in garden?

[Oliver Buckle]

Its dark black dirt scrapped off the surface of a very old wooded area behind my old house.

It is leaf mould, when the Saxons arrived in Briton and chopped down the trees they were ploughing that eight feet deep, the open fields round here are now clay, it rots away over time. It is great both for drainage and for holding water, but it won't have a lot in the way of nutrients in it.

 

[yardiron]

To me it looks like composted leaves.
I scraped off the loose upper layer and dug down a few feet to get at the dark black soil, that's what I loaded up and brought with me here. It was the same soil i used when i put the lawn in at the old house there. We had nothing but loose gravel and rocks, I had the big rocks blasted away and I back filled it with a foot or so of good top soil from the woods.

Maybe things are different over here? That woods had two streams and was likely mostly 130 year old growth where I dug out the top soil. (I had to dig there anyway because they wanted me to cut fire breaks in the trees for insurance purposes). It was mainly why I bought my JD 555 crawler and the 444 loader there. Plus four New Holland and one Case machine. I had 400 acres of wooded land at 2,400ft elevation there.
I still have the Case 580CK here. Moving dirt around is no problem if I need to.

The pile of dirt i've been drawing from is now 10 years old there. Plus I've turned in some cow manure from a buddies farm a few years ago. I've not tested it but the weeds sure like that pile, its already covered heavily ragweed and fleabane that comes back every year but never leaves the mound of dirt. There's likely something it needs in that dirt that it can't find anywhere else as it never spreads off the pile but it engulfs the pile by late fall in 5ft tall flower topped weeds that are great for those with pollen allergies

 

[headfullofbees]

It does not matter if the area is 2x2, 20x20, or 200x200, if one grows the same plants in the same location year after year after year, one will see a steady decline in production and quality and will see an accompanying steady increase of fungus and insect problems.

On a plot so small, it is impossible to infect one part of it with pests, fungal or insect. & to grow far enough away from them that they cannot follow.
So the build up will happen anyway.
If you grow brassicas you may be unfortunate enough to get clubroot.
These spores can lay dormant in the soil for 20 years, and one good downpour can move them all over a 20x20 plot very easily.
That's if you don't move them about on your shoes yourself.
So! Grow your brassicas in the same spot each year, but start them in 3" pots, putting them in deep when they have 4 true leaves, with a dessertspoon of lime in the planting hole.
Then it doesn't matter if you have clubroot, as the lime will raise the pH of the soil surrounding the roots, to a level where clubroot spores can't open.
Nor will you protect yourself from diseases like verticillium or fusarium wilt, as insects act as the vector from plant to plant over a wide area; that's why many professional growers use grafted plants, with rootstocks vigorous enough to overcome the infections.
Onions: Robinsons is a company in the UK known for providing seed of show quality & they have been growing in the same patches for over 70 years. Grow them only from seed, then you do not put any white-rot infected roots into the soil. Once it's in the soil, you'll not be able to grow onions or garlic in your plot again.

Which pests are you going to protect your plants from, in a 20x20 bed, by using rotation?
Which pests can't move, or be moved, the length & breadth of a plot that size?

 

[yardiron]

The only 'pests' I've had to deal with is bacterial canker or spot one year and we have huge numbers of ground hogs here.
(Tomatoes started getting bleached out white spots all over the tops that turned into round bullseye blotches or rotten spots). It happened only during the super hot weeks of summer, when the temps were over 90 degrees for several weeks at a time that year.
Once the weather cooled, the spots and bad spots were gone and the plants went on producing just fine with the new growth producing spotless tomatoes till November while the lower plant, nearly 6ft tall by that point was almost devoid of leaves. The new growth was thick and heavy with leaves and the plants draped over the tops of heir 6ft cages made from concrete reinforcement wire.

Ground hogs are what made me give up on planting any leafy green in the garden. I now have two raised boxes 8ft long for cabbage and romaine lettuce, and a few red beets.
The 20x20 plot gets peas/beans in one row seasonally, tomatoes in another, okra in another and zucchini/ pickles and peppers in the last row.
I put 8 large variety indeterminate tomato plants in one 20ft row, about 40 Okra plants per row, and I use the same spacing and cages for my zucchini, and pickles, usually 2 pickle plants, and 6 zucchini plants, plus 2 or 4 jalepeno plants, and sometimes I squeaze in an extra pepper plant at the end of the tomoto row too. I used to till up longer rows but the last 10ft of ground never produced much and watering that section meant soaking wear and tear on the building both due to wear from the plants or constant water. Since I rebuilt the wall on the shed I shortened the four rows down to 20ft tops. If it were up to me, I'd have put that shed on the other side of the yard but I'm not busting up a perfectly good foundation and building just to gain a bit of garden space, and doing so would also mean taking out a massive silver maple tree that would cost a fortune to have removed. Besides, i don't really want loose another shade tree.

 

[headfullofbees]

The only way to rotate on a plot that size is to grow only one crop.

 

[yardiron]

The only way to rotate on a plot that size is to grow only one crop.

That is mostly why I changed the soil a few years ago and I add huge amounts of organic matter each year.
The soil in there now is not the same soil that was there 4 years ago, and even in between those times when I dug out the whole
garden bed, I add so many ground up leaves and compost to it that there's little original soil remaining.
When I 'changed the soil' I took my front end loader and scraped off all the top soil down to the orange dirt and clay several feed down and replaced it with virgin soil from back in the woods that was loaded with organic matter from years of leaf compost.
When I came here, I bought a trailer load of that dirt with me. Three 6ft wide bucket loads about strips the whole plot down beyond the top soil in minutes. The old soil gets added to the back of my compost pile after and used to churn into the mix over time. I also cover that soil up with plastic in the sun for several weeks in mid summer after it came out of the garden before it ever gets turned into the compost.
I have no other choice here, there's no place to rotate the garden too. For the most part it does well.

I also pretty much figured out that I can't add too much lime and I can't add too much nitrogen. Adding plenty of both make it a healthy garden each year. I'm hoping to put my plants in today or tomorrow once the storm passes if its not too wet and muddy. Its been blowing and raining every night all week so far.

In an ideal situation, how many years should a plot be given a break from growing tomatoes?
The longest I did was three years but they didn't do as well in other areas of the yard.

 

[FloridaGreenThumb]

I was putting coffee grounds in my compost pile and then I read that they were bad for worm, and I love my little worms so I do not put it in there any more. I went and looked at where I found that information and it was on a site called Rural Sprout, here's and excerpt from that site:

"Apparently as the coffee grounds break down, they release “organic compounds and chemicals” which kill the worms.

It would appear that coffee grounds are not so great for earthworms after all. And you need more earthworms in your soil.

And as if murdering innocent earthworms wasn’t bad enough, it appears that coffee has antibacterial properties, too.

So, instead of helping the thriving microbiota of your compost, tossing those coffee grounds in could actually kill off helpful microbes."

The site is: Ruralsprout.com

 

[yardiron]

Seems to me I also read somewhere that coffee grounds inhibit root growth in tomato plants.

I don't think coffee grounds hurt worms, at least not used coffee grounds
Years ago we used to raise worms for fishing bait, one of the best worm foods was listed as coffee grounds.
Worms seemed to be attracted to coffee grounds. If we put a pile of coffee grounds in one corner of the box, we would find all the worms in that area the next day. We did have to keep an eye on the pH though, if the box got too acidic we would ad pulverized egg shells or gypsum to bring it back to neutral.
That was a trick i learned from an old timer as a kid, he always show up at the lake with massive night crawlers, in his later years he showed me his secret for getting them that big so fast. He would put one or two filters full of grounds in the box every three days, and water the box with a mix of water and grounds that he kept in the shed. He'd dump all his grounds in a bucket, then make a tea with a weeks worth of coffee grounds and use that to water the bedding with.
Worms feed on microbes, they follow the microbe growth in the compost as a source of food.
The things we would never put in the worm beds are potatoes, any greasy food scraps and salt or salty kitchen waste.
Fertilizer is also a bad, as are grass clippings that have been well fertilized recently before cutting.
N food scraps like pickles vinegar, alcohol, or urine. Horse manure was a godo source of food so long as it was not full of urine. If it was it need to be aged and then composted first. You also have to make sure the horses it came from have not recently been wormed as the meds in the horse manure will kill earth worms too.