Resolute

Regular readers (both of you!) will recall my New Year's resolution--- to improve my fertilizing practices. If I needed any inspiration, I got plenty from Wayne Clifton's fertilizer talk in Sarasota back in February. You can find some of my notes from his talk in my post of March 8.

So how's that resolution going? So far, so good--- the great fertilizer upgrade of 2015 is in full swing.

I care for around 300 plants on my 2-acre spread. As a retired geezer I have enough time, so for me the hardest part is keeping track of what's been fertilized, with what, and when. To keep track of who is planted where, I had made a diagram on the computer showing the location of each significant plant. It's too big to print out, so I chopped it up nine printable sections. Next, I inventoried all my fertilizers, foliar sprays, and major soil amendments--- 20 or so from various times and places--- and gave them two-letter codes. Each time I apply one, I write the date and code next to the plant on the page on which it appears. I'll use the charts for two or three months, then print fresh copies, keeping the back ones handy for reference.

For some amendments, like soil acidifiers and anti-fungal sprays, the plants that receive them are scattered about. For these cases I started a table with the date, the application, and the list of plants that received it. So far it shows foliar nutrients on all the citrus, and anti-fungal spray on the mangos plus everybody else that showed any sign of problems.

The system looks promising, but the first round of fruit trees was quite a chore. After my first few plantings three years ago, when I naively planted low "so they can get more water", I learned about planting on mounds, at least a few inches above the surrounding soil. But when you are digging up sod in the hot Florida sun, you generally don't feel like clearing "a circle 10 feet in diameter" as
the IFAS people would have it, so the mounds were rather small. Each year I have enlarged the cleared and mulched zone. This year I bought bags of topsoil and enlarged the mounds as well, then applied the first spring fertilizer and a thick layer of mulch. It's also the perfect time to check that the irrigation is working properly, for those trees lucky enough to have it. All this attention for each tree makes it a slow process. But like many big jobs, breaking it up into just a few each day makes it relatively painless.

My first goal was to complete initial fertilization by March 31, and I made it, just barely. With the "spring cleaning" finished, it should be easier the rest of the year. So far I'm on course to collect that gold star on New Year's Eve.