By William White

Published: February 6, 2008

A source of water and a soil test are two of the things to consider before starting a garden at home this year.

“First, the big thing, especially after last year, is there somewhere you can get water?” Said Dani Carroll, county extension agent, in the Lee County Extension System office in Opelika. “If there is no way to get water there, I wouldn’t waste my time planting there. Decide on how you are going to get the water to the site.”

Carroll said having a home irrigation system or being able to get soaker hoses to the site would be optimal.

“By all means, get a soil test,” she said. “After the water, you have got to do that next.”m “You are going to want the garden soil to have a ph of about 6.5,” she said. “The soil test will return information about the soil’s ph and information about how much lime needs to be applied to bring the ph up.” “The soil test results are based on whatever you are growing. They will also include fertilizer recommendations based on how much phosphorus and potassium are already in your soil.”

The county agent said there might not be any reason to use triple 13, or fertilizer in a bag marked 13-13-13. Garden soil could have a potassium level that is too high.

You may not need either if you have been using triple 13 for years and years.

The garden site needs to be reasonably flat and the plant material there removed, or killed and tilled in.

“I’m making my hill flat by digging out,” she said.

Instead of using a chemical to kill grass and weeds, Carroll puts two or three newspaper pages down over the site, covers them with a lot of compost, leaves it about a month and then tills all of that into her garden’s soil.

She said the next decision is deciding what you want to grow in your garden, and suggests ordering and starting plants from seed inside as a way to extend your season of gardening.m “The typical three things are tomatoes, peppers and squash,” Carroll said, but included okra, bush beans, onions, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, collards, turnips and loose-leaf lettuce.

The county agent said adding flowers helps attract bees and butterflies to the vegetables’ blooms to aid with pollination.  She suggests zinnias, astors, marigolds, trumpet vine, sunflowers, milkweed or lantana planted all around the garden. “Also adding herbs throughout the garden helps break up the monotony,” Carroll said.

Gardening publications can be obtained at the extension office, 600 Seventh Ave., Opelika, or printed out from the Web site, http://www.aces.edu.

For more information contact the extension office on weekdays at 749-3353.

Tips on fertilizer:
Dr. Lee Stribling explains how bags of fertilizer list the product’s strength and nutrients:
“The main elements plants need in the soil to grow are Nitrogen, abbreviated ‘N’; Phosphorus, ‘P’; and Potassium, ‘K’. Every fertilizer lists the amount of these elements on the bag in that order, N-P-K. The first number is the percentage of Nitrogen contained in that fertilizer blend, the second is the percentage of Phosphorus, and the third the percentage of Potassium.

“If you have trouble remembering the order of these ingredients (NPK), use the salesman’s trick, ‘No Puney Korn.’ “Example: 13-13-13 (called triple-13) is a common fertilizer blend widely available. The three 13s mean that 13 percent of the bag’s weight is N; 13 percent is P; and 13 percent is K.