Diagnosing Deficiencies in Soil & Garden

Video Transcript

"In this segment we are going to talk about diagnosing fertilizer efficiencies, generally speaking, in garden plants, especially like tomatoes and peppers and things like that by the color of the plant or the color of the leaves. Generally speaking, when you have a yellow plant, when the leaves are not bright green, they have more of a yellow color to them, that's generally a nitrogen deficiency. Now generally speaking, you don't put a bunch of nitrogen on a garden or on flowers even because nitrogen generally prefers vegetative growth not necessarily bloom production or produce production. So you don't usually put a lot of nitrogen on so you don't usually have trouble with nitrogen deficiency in a garden but it does occur. Also, in seedlings especially, when you say you got tomatoes or green beans or something like that, that are growing in less than ideal growing conditions. Say they have germinated and they are just an inch or so tall and you've got cool and wet conditions. A phosphoresce deficiency can be a problem and generally speaking the leaf will turn a purplish color or a dark color, it won't be green. Then potash deficiency generally speaking, instead of having a yellow plant or a green plant, you've got in between there, you've kind of got a pea green from top to bottom and a lot times that will be a potassium deficiency."