Did I DESTROY My Garden With COMPOST?

Right about now, this garden that I spent all winter building and hoping for and being so excited to finally have a full vegetable garden at the new house, it should be by this point just covered in green. After all, I sowed all of these seeds over a month ago now. If you watched the video I did a couple weeks ago, I told you that I was having germination issues out here and the the plants that actually germinated were not thriving. They were sickly looking, brown, just not at all what I expected my first spring season to start out like. In that video, I told you I suspected salt damage from the compost that I brought in. Well, the test results are in and I will let you know in this video if I have to start this entire garden completely from scratch, empty out all the soil, or if there might be a simple solution. And stick around to the end because I've got another great giveaway for you. Hey, I'm Brian with Next Level Gardening. If you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips, tricks, and support to help you take your gardening to the next level, you're in the right place. Get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything. Now let's get not growing too fast. So like I said, I thought that salt damage was my issue and there would be a pretty simple solution for that. However, I would say 25% of the comments that I got from you guys was the fact that I might have grazon damage. So first off, for those of you who are not aware what grazon is, grazon is a broadleaf herbicide that farmers will use when they're growing hay or corn or any other grass type crop, mainly hay though, for feed to animals. And they spray this on the alfalfa hay or whatever kind of hay they're growing because the alfalfa hay is not affected. It's a grass and so it only affects broadleaf weeds and it keeps their product clean, weed free. Not too clean in my opinion when you've got herbicides all over it. The problem with that is, this is fed to horses and cows and the horses and cows, it goes right through their digestive system. They poop it out, becomes what should be great, wholesome, wonderful manure to put in your garden. Problem is that grazon lives on and you are now adding a compost to your garden that is a herbicide. And most of what we grow other than corn and maybe if you're growing some grain, those are broadleaf plants and so it will either kill your garden or severely, severely mangle and disfigure your plants. Grazon damage typically represents as twisted stems, leaves that are not fully developed. It just, it looks a mess and you're going to know something's desperately wrong. And the other problem with grazon is it can last for up to three years. So if I had grazon damage, I would either have to wait three years to plant my new garden or remove all of the compost out of every single bed and start over from scratch. Now while I had thought of grazon, I kind of ruled it out, not a hundred percent because there's always a chance, but the leaves on the plants that had germinated were not horribly disfigured like you would typically see in grazon. They were unhealthy looking, they were not thriving, the seed leaves were deformed, but then the secondary leaves were fine or not fine, but they weren't deformed, they just looked unhealthy. I also had used the compost to pot up some fruit trees that I had gotten and those fruit trees started showing tips of their being burned and that is very typical of salt damage. And so while I probably should have talked about grazon in the last video, I wasn't even focused on that because I was pretty sure I didn't have that, I had the salt damage. Now after I did that video over the next week, some things started to slowly change without even having to intervene. Some of the newer leaves on the ones that had germinated were looking better. Each set of leaves that grew looked a little bit better than the previous. The fruit trees that had dry tips, those leaves were actually almost completely dead and crispy and falling off. However, there were new leaf buds taking their place. Now that's probably not going to happen with grazon damage. So what I did was I bought a salinity test from a pool supply store and I took a sample from three spots. First of all, I took a sample of the water that I was going to use to put in this mixture to be able to test, so I knew that that wasn't going to affect the salinity in any way and that came back as pretty much zero. Then I took three samples. I took one from the original compost heap that's still out there in the front of the house, that's still got a lot of compost there that I could use. I took a sample from there. I took a sample from this bed closest to me because I had put the compost in this bed at the same time as all the others, but I hadn't planted it yet, which means I hadn't watered it yet. And then I took a sample from one of the beds that I had sowed seeds in and been watering for three weeks. So the test results were promising. In fact, they really showed me that my assumption was correct and I was not going to have to start over from scratch. The water test came back zero to 0.5, somewhere between there. The bed that had been planted and was growing a little bit and the leaves were getting better as time passed, that bed came up as a level one. So there was still some salt in there, but it has obviously been leaching out because the plants are getting better and only a level one. The bed that I had not watered and the compost heap that was sitting there raw and untouched were between a five and a six. Now this is a level between one and ten, but anything other than above one is is probably too much salt for plants to thrive. So I was very happy with that result. Another thing I did was a couple weeks before when I first started suspecting possible grazon or salt, didn't know which one, I sowed some corn seed in this first bed up here. Knowing that corn is a grass and if that corn came up quickly with no problems, that might be a grazon. Because I don't know if there's any grazon tests that you can have taken, but that would show me that grazon was not affecting the corn, but it was affecting all of the other plants. Well, two weeks or more into it, that corn still has not germinated. So that was good news. So the other good news is salt in the beds I had been watering for three weeks was already leaching out. So I could just take the time and continue to water and water and water and just slowly leach that salt out of the soil in all these beds or out of the compost. But I don't have time for that. You know, the time is wasting and the year is moving on, the season is moving on. And I also told you I have a film crew coming here, professional film crew coming mid-July to film this for a project that I can't divulge what it is because it's not my project, but hopefully soon I will be able to. But I don't have time to wait for all of that, for all these reasons. Plus, I just want to get my garden started. This is the first garden I have here, really. So I went out and bought some gypsum. Now, gypsum actually binds with salt when it's washed through the soil and helps it leach out much faster. So Emily and I sprinkled a very liberal amount of gypsum over the tops of all of the raised beds. Kind of looked like we had a little bit of a snow here in Southern California, but no, just the gypsum. And then I watered it in very well until all of it was dissolved. And after that, I went back and watered it all again. I really wanted to start flushing that salt out as much as possible. And I'm going to water every single day, even if it gives too much water to the plants that are growing here. I'm okay with that. I have to start all over anyway. But flushing that out, I'm hoping by this time next week, I'll be able to plant. Of course, I'll do another test to make sure before I do that. So fortunately that is a simple fix. However, I got an email or a message the other day from a viewer and my heart sunk when I saw it because I'm not sure if he had watched my previous video or not, but what he sent me, the pictures he sent me was classic grazon damage. So what do you do if you have grazon damage in your garden? Well, the fastest, not the easiest, but the fastest thing to do is to remove all of the soil down to at least 12 inches and get rid of it. That's easier in a raised bed than in the ground for sure. Another thing you can do is plant some cover crops that are like grasses. You can plant like corn, buckwheat, rye, and those are going to absorb the grazon out of the soil. It doesn't damage those types of plants, but it will absorb it and then after that season you can pull them out by the roots. Do not compost it for sure because that grazon keeps going. It's just a wonderful product, another gift from Big Ag, but it will keep on going for, like I said, three years. Get rid of that. Don't put it in your yard waste recycling. Throw it in the trash or burn it if you're in an area where you do that. If you put it in your yard waste, you're just passing the problem on to somebody else. So once you have that done, you can prepare the soil in a little spot. Plant a few seeds or some small transplants. Take care of them. Give it some time. See if they exhibit that same problem and if they do, plant another cover crop. You got to go through the same process until your seeds and seedlings are looking good. I know it's a big mess. It's a big issue. I'm so fortunate that I don't have that here yet, but I'm not going to because here's what I'm going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again and how I can limit my exposure to grazon. I'm not swearing off the mushroom farm that I got this from. I'm not. What I am going to do is test any batches that come in for salt and I'm also going to do a little patch of that compost and plant it before I put it all over everything. Now another thing I'm going to do this summer and I mentioned it a couple videos ago is to start my own composting system here on the property. I had one at my last house. Kind of small, but for the size garden I had it was it was workable. But I need a much bigger one here. Not only do I have more to put in it, but I've got more to take out and and more space to use it on. In preparation for this and to help all of you, a couple videos ago I did a collaboration with Tony over at Simplify Gardening in the UK. He had just written a book, Composting Masterclass, so I went to the master himself to get your questions answered. If you haven't watched that video, I'll link it down below. But Tony actually offered a signed copy of one of his new books to one of my viewers, one of you guys. I've got two giveaways going on at the same time. We just have one in yesterday's video, so I'm going to try to keep this straight. Not always the best at that, but I write everything down, put it in the calendar. The first way to enter is to be a subscriber to Next Level Gardening. Like this video. Comment on this video. And then the second way to enter is over on Instagram. Just go to today's post showing this video and comment on that. Make sure you're following me on Instagram. And between those two ways, I'm going to pick a winner next week. This will go for seven days and I'll pick a winner after that. Tony will get a signed copy of his new book, Composting Masterclass, out to you. All right, guys, I hope you learned something. I hope you don't have either one of these problems to deal with, but if you do, now you know how to do it. See you next time.