Interesting Results From FitOldDog’s Vegetable Gardening Experiment

Plot A, bacterial treatment and worms only, gave by far the best results. Surprising that the bacteria plus worm casts did not – is this a useful result or statistical variance? Photo by FitOldDog.

Here is my experiment – the successful plot was the one furthest away, with only worms and bacterial treatment. I seeded the whole area (too late in the season!) with a mixture of winter greens and turnips. Photo by FitOldDog.

Remember my vegetable gardening experiment, set up a couple of months ago? I set up four different plots of immature soil, all with added worms, as follows (A) bacterial treatment, (B) worm casts, (C) bacterial treatment and worm casts, (D) nothing extra. Well, the results are in, though I guess I have to repeat it a number of times to be sure. That said, I’m going to apply bacterial treatment across the whole thing for my spring garden.

I’ve had a bunch of vegetable gardens in my time, and I think that the best was in Scotland, where the conditions are harsh, but due to the weather there are much fewer pests than here, in North Carolina. When I arrived here to work in The Research Triangle Park, in 1981, one of the first things I did was to take some soil and take a look under a microscope. I was amazed by the number and activity of round worms (nematodes) in the soil in these hotter climes. I tried growing peas, a cool weather crop, and they flourished, but as soon as they were mature enough to collect the pods the aphid infestation took my breath away. However, if you want to grow tomatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, or squash, you can’t beat North Carolina.