Question for you all. Two years ago I built a garden box and bought
loads of soil, manure, and compost (our soil sucks, so it's easier just
to build your own garden). Had wonderful tomatoes, just huge, overgrown
bushes. Unfortunately, we had Japanese beetles, which proceeded to eat
all our pepper plants, the basil, and a few other things. They ignored
the tomatoes, but pretty much devastated everything else.

Because we had a number of herbs in the garden, we didn't want to use any
kind of pesticide, since we eat the leaves of the herbs. So last year,
we got some milky spore powder, which was advertised as a way to keep
Japanese beetles out of the garden. You could say that it worked, as we
didn't really have any beetle problems. Largely because we didn't have
any plants. The tomatoes shot up, but never produced fruit, and the
plants just died. Didn't get much in the way of peppers, though, to be
fair, the herbs did well.

So the question is, did the milky spore have something to do with this,
or did I just not fertilize enough last year? I can't imagine that first
year could have sucked all the nutrients out of the soil, so the milky
spore powder would seem to be the obvious "X factor".

Anyways, it's getting near garden time and I'm trying to figure out
whether I need to get new dirt or if the old is salvageable.
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Dan Iwerks, slave to the masses, loves Vapor Trails.
The fundamental problem with Solipsism is it makes me
responsible for the fact that you're a complete idiot.
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