Let’s talk about another major change we’ve made this season. It’s one of those “scary” ones in gardening. Yeah, we’re going to talk about pH, or the potential of hydrogen.
Most gardeners, including ourselves, completely ignore pH. It’s a logarithmic scale, from 0 to 14, that measures substances from acid to base. You might know it’s important, and might have even read some stuff about it, but it doesn’t “seem” to matter. For the most part, you can ignore it entirely and plants will grow “good enough” and you can get a decent harvest with zero attention paid to pH.
Where we are at, as gardeners, is a place where we’ve gotten pretty good at growing most things. We could just be satisfied by that and keep doing what we do. But, there is a step up from here. Which means you no longer accept “good enough” and actually try to achieve “optimal,” or perhaps “perfect.” In our short season, if we can improve growth even by small margins, more and higher quality produce means better use of our time.
pH in botany is a very complicated topic, requiring white papers to describe, so we’ll only poorly summarize it here. Essentially, the pH your plant experiences is influenced by practically everything. Your water, your fertilizer, what’s in your soil, where your soil elements come from, rainfall, the plant you’re growing and even other things. Plants can grow in a fairly wide range of pH, but there is a known range that could be considered optimal for most plants. (Typically 5.5 to 6.5, with a few plants preferring values outside of that range.)
When you get outside of that optimal range, it influences the plant’s ability to uptake certain nutrients. It doesn’t go to zero, unless your pH is at extreme levels. But, it does become less and less the further away from optimal you get. Typically, this results in very minor nutritional deficiencies and may even be unnoticeable. But, when you can achieve optimal, there is literally nothing holding back your plant other than its own genetics and ability to grow.
We’ve known our pH is slightly out of whack for years since we heavily utilize peat moss. Limestone (or garden lime) is your typical preferred correction in this case. But, for complex chemistry reasons, this isn’t a “one and done” thing. We’ve found substrate correction difficult, because we can’t “truly” measure it. But, we can more easily correct things with our water, which heavily influences the pH of the substrate.
We will tell you that our efforts to get the “correct” pH this season have been met by an undeniable benefit. We are not just seeing a minor difference, but a major one. More fruit, faster growth and much higher plant quality. Just by correcting water and fertigation additions to a pH of around 6.0. (There’s a bit more to it that we’ll thread in tomorrow, too.)
The longer we’ve gardened in an “extreme” climate, the more we’ve realized that the sum of a lot of little things can make a huge difference. For us, this effort is just another one of those small pieces. We can’t always create “perfect” conditions for our plants, but we can make sure everything else is dialed in and as optimal as possible.
We know a post like this isn’t for everyone, we’re not necessarily recommending this path for the average northern grower. But, one of our goals is to address everyone, beginner to expert. We are almost a month into our growing season with pH correction being regularly utilized. I can all ready foresee this being a regular part of our growing practice in the future.
