about your garden! I had no idea! True story. It's a real thing!

Backstory- I don't live on flat land. My yard is lots of small hills and little valleys. So I don't have say, one or two large garden areas. I have a few dozen small, medium and large beds strategically places to capture water, to provide shade and use the best dirt I could find here to grow in.

One spot is next to the driveway. When I got here there were 3 dead Siberian elms there and it was covered in gravel from the driveway like a 2 lane highway.... with dead trees. So, I got rid of the trees. I scraped back the thick layer of gravel and I built it up and amended this bed. It had lots of decent dirt from the dead trees (leaf litter) and lots of aggregate from the gravel driveway (good drainage). So I amended it with lots more leaves and compost and bags and bags of organic dirt and fertilizer and wallah.. I had a nice 8'x14' bed to grow in.

I've been growing in it for many years now and it has gone well but I never grew too close to the fence because it was in shade all the time. But several years ago I realized I needed to be growing most everything in some shade. So last year I planted 4 extra tomato plants against the fence because I had nowhere else to put them, The seedlings slowly withered and died. This past summer I did the same thing and the same thing was happening. They were slowly withering away. So, I paid attention! It seemed to me that the soil there had too much drainage and wasn't holding water so I added another bag of dirt. 2 weeks later I tested it again and again it seemed like the dirt wasn't holding water.

So.......I thought I came up with this smart idea. I had just bought a new package of a dozen pairs of socks and had retired my old socks to the rag bag. Since they were plain, old lady, cotton socks and I had been wearing them for more than a year I knew they could hold a lot of water! Old ladies have a sense about this stuff. So I dug down next to each tomato plant and put a rolled up sock next to the roots of each plant which I knew would hold plenty of water. They continued to wither anyway. So, I knew they had enough water but died anyway. I got really concerned and decided to plant a cover crop there. Maybe I could learn something from this.

But, as I was digging up the roots of the plants to prepare for the cover crop I quickly saw that my socks were gone!! Almost! All that I found were tiny little black scummy bits of what my socks had been just 8 weeks earlier! Holy mother of Mary! What the heck! I panicked. I was horrified, mortified, scared silly! I figured there must be some kind of horrific toxic gick in my garden bed! And I had zucchini growing in this bed and I had been eating it all summer, lots and lots of it. I was totally freaking out! Was I contaminated with toxic gick? After all these years of eating a super healthy diet full of my own organic vegies?? And I had a good cry. Then I started researching where I could find a lab that could evaluate my dirt, not for NPK or carbon to nitrogen ratio or even heavy metals but for actual toxic gick! I was so freaking out. And I couldn't find any labs that were helpful. Not having the answers for several months was a little bit terrifying.

And just by accident when I was researching compost last week I came across lots of these websites that suggest you use your cotton underwear to determine the health of your garden.

https://www.agrinews-pubs.com/...

https://pasafarming.org/soil-y...

As these websites say....Cotton undies can tell you a lot about the health of your soil! ... "Cotton is a form of carbon and basically microbes use carbon as their energy source as they are decomposing things throughout the soil. The carbon is like their fuel or their food and the more decomposed the underwear are in the field, the more microbial activity we have in the field." I keep giggling whenever I think of that! And O.K.!! Old lady cotton socks aren't as risque or interesting as cotton undies but what do you expect from an old lady! It appears that my soil is in great shape and there is such a thing as too much shade. You can look at these websites and try it for yourself. Still learning something new every day.
Happy gardening everyone.
Debbie

Fun! Also good to know you've found that level of "too much shade" on the screaming hot desert!

That was an amusing read! ; ) What had you originally expected to happen to the socks?

I've put a lot of 100% cotton clothing in the compost over the years and it definitely disappears quickly, especially under something juicy like watermelon rind. It's my goal to compost all of our organic matter, but it's never as much as I would like. It takes a LOT of organic matter to change very light color soil that is so hard that it takes a maddock to dig a hole - into black gold garden soil.

I really enjoyed that anecdote. You had me in suspense. I have tons of old underwear, socks and t-shirts. I keep them as rags for my workshop for cleanup and when I am staining wood. I have a surplus supply (hate to throw things out that can be re-purposed). Maybe I'll try putting some in my compost pile and see what happens.

Hello Everyone. It is so nice to hear from you all.
Hi Zoe, Yes, the differences are so dramatic here between full sun, dappled sun and bright shade and full shade. It has been fun to find the sweet spots for all of the plants. Except when I forget to take into account how far up and down the sun moves between late spring and late summer and fall. I hope Mother Nature is grading me on a curve!

And Jim, I definitely take after you.... except that I tend to wear my clothes into rags. I'm still wearing them in the garden long after I decide that I can't wear these out in public any more. But I haven't made the birds blush yet, so no harm, no fowl. And there are a million and one uses for them once they hit the rag bag, for painting and staining and changing the oil in the truck is just the beginning. And I can only imagine the look on my face when I was working in a hardware store years ago and for the first time I saw someone BUY a box of RAGS! Jimminy Crickets!

Hi Tiffany, I appreciate you. I wear t-shirts every day but like my sheets they all seem to have some polyester in them. And they work great for strainers. I'm always trying concoctions out of garlic or peppers or cilantro with water to repel the bugs and they're perfect to strain through them before I pour it in my sprayer. My jeans are cotton but there are so many uses for old jeans. I make leggings out of them and wear them over my pants and shoes when I am weedwhacking. It's so helpful when I have to whack damp weeds or the ones all covered in burrs! And when I'm planting in ugly, black pots I always wrap a leg around it. It keeps the roots cool and looks much prettier when tied with a bow. And my lightweight, portable scarecrows would be bare-arsed without them.

I've never grown cotton, only worn it. And my socks were tough! They take a pounding when I wear them. And they hold up through heat and sweat and I would have believed that some of the smells alone could cause them to disintegrate but they don't. They were the definition of tough! I thought they would eventually decompose but not to disappear almost completely in just 8 weeks! I learn something new every day. Happy gardening everyone.