Peppers. Acidifying the soil.

[b54red]

My beds have become too alkaline over time and I have been trying to correct that over the last couple of years. My soil was once very acidic and needed a fair amount of lime and I even had to use quick lime early on to bring the acidic levels down. When the soil got where it was supposed to be I quit adding lime but did put in tons of fresh mushroom compost over a four year period and that really spiked up my alkaline levels.

Three years ago I tested all of my beds because I was having problems with iron deficiency showing in some of my tomatoes even though I knew there was plenty of iron in the soil. Turned out my beds had a PH of between 7.6 and 8.4. I'm sure a lot of micro-nutrients were not available to many of my tomatoes and peppers despite decent production. I also noticed that some of my more acidic varieties were getting a bit too mild. I started using a lot of cottonseed meal as my main source of fertilizer and my soil is gradually getting more acidic.

Last year I tried using a vinegar-water feeding on all of my peppers and tomatoes. It really did seem to perk up some of my peppers and they became much darker and healthier looking. It also seemed to help many of my larger tomatoes and much of the iron deficiency symptoms went away. The problem was on some of my smaller newer tomato plants. Within a couple of days after receiving the vinegar-water feeding they changed color and started getting really sick looking. Most of them died within a few weeks but they had the look of plants that had taken in too much of some type of element. I don't know but I think what happened is they received a massive dose of P that must have been released by the vinegar or maybe iron. I really don't have any idea what the element or combination of elements was that caused the discoloration of the leaves and the eventual death of the plants. Since being the foolish gardener I am I treated all of the plants to the same treatment without doing a testing batch first. I believe the problem was the younger plants just couldn't handle the amount of nutrients or trace elements that became available suddenly while the larger more mature tomatoes thrived from it.

I don't think this would happen with soil that is closer to the correct PH; but if your soil is way too alkaline be careful and use very dilute vinegar and gradually add it over time so you don't have the problem I had. Since I do staggered plantings and had all ages of plants getting the treatment at the same time I only lost a few plants; but I feel like if I had done this earlier when all I had was young freshly transplanted seedlings I might have had a real disaster on my hands.

Since my soil is still too alkaline I will probably be adding the vinegar again but will limit it to larger tomatoes which it helped and too peppers which really seemed to benefit the most from the vinegar.

Bill