Plant root update,

[Worth1]

Some of you guys may remember back in the spring how I dug holes in the very hard yard where cars were parked before I moved in.

In these holes I planted tomatoes.

Yesterday I pulled up the plants and they had nice healthy feeder roots about the size of a pencil growing along the surface just under the compost I had placed on the top of the ground.

Some of these roots must have been fairly long, as 3 feet away they were still large.

As for the depth of the holes, no taproots or any roots were found below about 6 inches.

This tells me that I need to dig down only about a foot this winter and make the area of the trench about three or four feet wide and not the two feet that I had originally wanted to do.

In the back patch the soil was only about 6 inches down and then heavy clay.

The same was true for this area, nice healthy roots.

Most of these plants were around 10 feet tall 3 feet wide or more and very healthy.
They had grown to the top of 5 foot stakes and then back down the stake and then sprawled along the ground.
Some even came back up the other plants.
A real jungle.

The difference between the front and back patch was the back had morning sun the front evening sun.
The other was the back patch had good soil all over the surface of the ground but not down deep as was the opposite of the front patch.

For those of you that are interested it tells me that if you have a very bad soil you can just put down about a foot or 10 inches of good soil at the most and have good results.
I’m just adding 6 inches this winter my self.

At least it worked for me.

Worth