What is wrong with my garden?

[RamblingChicken]

I had some raised beds installed. I bought garden soil and added compost.

I'm still curious as to how much compost? I'm not demanding precise information, just, half compost and half soil, almost all soil and a sprinkling of compost, that sort of approximation. And what sort of compost? Do you still have the bags, so that you can tell us the ingredients?

My goal is to add just a half inch of compost to my beds per year, but that's because I live in a region that has a soil pest that enjoys compost. Without that, I'd add a lot more, but it's still possible to add too much.

I'm wondering about the quality of the soil. I've never purchased garden soil, and I feel a bit suspicious of the idea of purchased soil

I added compost and some nitrogen

Next time I would recommend adding a balanced organic fertilizer made for vegetables. I say this particularly because you're using purchased soil, so you really don't know what sort of fertility it has.

I struggle to determine how much and how frequently to water my plants.

I would recommend watering very deeply, but not very frequently. It's hard to know how deep "very deeply" is, of course. One strategy is to water quite a bit, keeping track of how long you watered, and then dig a hole. When you discover with exasperation that the soil is quite dry just a few inches down, water some more. The goal is a situation where you could dig forever and never reach a 'dry' layer, because your watered layer would reach all the way down to the point where the soil is naturally damp.

In an ideal world, I would water veeery deeply, once every ten days. I haven't yet had the courage to wait quite that long between waterings, and with raised beds, which drain faster, it might not be possible to wait that long. I just say it to give you an idea, and to talk you out of, say, watering twice a day.

- How hot and how wet has it been?
over 90 during the peak of the summer

That's not terribly hot. It does of course mean that you need enough water, but for most of your crops I don't think that heat would be an issue. (But at that temperature, I wouldn't expect spinach to come up, and I would expect lettuce to be pretty finicky--I would presprout lettuce seed.)

The beans were grown outside of the raised beds in regular unprepared dirt

AHA! AAAAAAAAAHA!

Ahem.

OK, I'm blaming many of your problems on that purchased dirt. Now, you'll need fertilizer when you re-plant that area next year, because it will be somewhat depleted from the beans. But, still, the purchased dirt is the suspect now.

I followed the package in regards to spacing. I did not thin them though.

It took me years to accept that I really, really have to thin. With some plants, failure to thin, all by itself, can cause failure.

And I would recommend planting things a bit further apart than the package recommends. Those spacings assume that everying is pretty much just right, and while you're learning, there's a fair chance that everything is not just right. More space gives the plants more water, nutrients, etc, with less competition.

I also bought a moisture meter kit. There were some areas that did not germinate and it turns out that they were not getting enough water.

Yep--it's hard to believe how very, very many minutes of watering it takes to get soil saturated after it's started to get dry. If you're watering by hand, I recommend bringing a chair and headphones. Water an area until it's shiny and puddly, turn the hose to another area until the first one is no longer shiny, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, until it starts to take quite a while for the shininess to drain away. Then dig a hole, curse when you find dry dirt, and keep watering.

Once it's all saturated once, it takes much less watering time to keep it that way.

 

[akaydia]

I just checked on the lettuce. It seems to be growing well now. I'll do another soil test this weekend.

Thanks Rambling Chicken. Your advice really helps and covers the questions that I had.

I added an inch of compost.