Well, I had half a truckload of soil after helping start a school garden, so we started to empty one of the raised containers I bought from a neighbor.
Things started out very nice when I origionaly started these beds, then everything turned yellow and died, so I gave up on them for the year.
Because I had this half truckload, I thought what the heck, I'll pull half the soil from the raised container and mix in this new soil and see what happens during the winter.
Well, we found that the soil in these containers was incredibly compacted under the 4-6 " I tilled with my little tiller! Enough that after digging out about 6" I'm going to try tilling the bottom 4" or so.
Could that compacted soil be the "root" of my problem? I only dug out the one (of three) of the containers for now. The rest we'll decide on through the winter and fix in the spring.
Nancy