What a random Millet plant can tell you about your soil

The millet stalk you see at the fence, start at the leaves, if they are yellowish green, it means there's a nitrogen deficiency. After that point, your soil is just about useless.

Millet does not require a great deal of nutrients to grow. That's why it is considered a very easy crop to grow. So that means if there is a problem with the growth of the millet, then there is definitely a serious problem going on beneath the surface. Compaction is one possibility, which I have witnessed in many instances where the topsoil appears to be decent but about ten centimeters below the topsoil it feels like concrete.

The poor growth in millet can be caused by phosphorus deficiency but that diagnosis gets assigned too frequently, sometimes it's the seed that is simply is not good.

This is also something that is overlooked. Millet is one of the best indicators of water movement in your fields. If you compare two parts of your field and one part has millet plants that are more than twice as tall as another part of your field, then you have either poor drainage or underground clay layers preventing water from moving to these plants. I probably need to become more aware of this myself.

Roots are much more important than height of the plant. Dig up a millet plant, if the roots are shallow, then the subsoil contains either toxic substances or it is too difficult to push through. Trying to fix this problem will take several years of continuous effort doing amendments, it's not a one season solution.

Some plants just have difficulty growing for an unexplainable reasons, but there's always a reason you just haven't found out yet.

_{Posted using SteemX}