Balancing Soil Minerals

[Ratzilla]

I am a believer in a highly aerated mix.
I see a mix that has a lot of aeration added to it akin to running nitrous oxide in a engine.
As oxygen is added so must the fuel (foods)be increased so you don't run LEAN.
Aeration and drainage go hand in hand.
Now mind you I am inside growing 2.5-3.5 foot plants in 2.5-3 gallon pots.
I run lean mixes that are fed by top dressings and teas.
I also know that what works for one grower might not be the answer for another.
Fore there are many approaches to success.
I believe it was Carey Reams who was first to use the analogy of looking at the soil like a battery.
Who postulated is your battery charged or dead?
My last soil test showed 37% organic matter with a CEC 40 (ME)
Screaming!
Ratz

 

[50YardLine]

I tend to agree with everybody here, too much top soil can be a bad thing.

I made up 20-40 yards of just 33% top soil, 33% lava, 20% EWC and 14% Turkey compost. This mix is very dense, and I have been trying to lighten it up for the last two seasons. It performs really well, but tends to stay really wet. Almost three times as dense as my coots mix.

However, I grow in 2 yards+ per plant. Just filled my first 1000 gallon pot, 5 yards!

 

[reppin2c]

I'm more of light mix type of guy. My soil this last season was balanced to astera ratios. The micros where at about 75% cuz you could go to far real quick. Then I just use .5 ml/gal micropak. Best I did was 5.98lb agent orange. 3-4 full sun and 4-5 ghouse all out of 100 gallon containers. So pretty good

I decided to make 100 yards maybe a bit more. I'm gonna call the sand and gravel company monday and go get a sample of they're top soil. I'll have my excavator buddy haul it to his yard as well as the compost. Mix in some pallet stuffs and amendments in February. Test reammend if needed and truck it in. That's the plan anyways.

Top soil is good but this CO grounds sucks so less is preferred

 

[Avinash.miles]

what sometimes passes for "topsoil" here in colorado is laughable...

but some raw bulk materials are available for free or little cost, sands that include gysum dust, potassium feldspar dust, and calcite dust also bentonite clay, peat, and lava rock are naturally all available in different areas of colorado (the list goes on)

 

[milkyjoe]

No doubt...but western slope the native soil is so salty nurseries, etc import some decent stuff. Home veggie gardens tend to be raised beds. Couple of decent sources in junk town and jeremy found me some a couple of yrs ago

They look at me funny when I ask for a baggie full to test

 

[vitamingreeninc]

Okay, I got the "ideal mix." Super cheap, with a great list of ingrediants I thought why not. I am going to mix 2 cubic foot peat, 1/2 cubic foot vermicompost(worm power) 1/2 cubic foot compost(oly mountain), and 1 cubic foot of lava rock. I have oyster shell flour, thinking 5 cups total...so y'all are with the the rep I have been talking to who says that 1 cup is plenty per cubic foot?

I also have Fish bone meal, I drink coffee/eat bananas daily, have a 3 year old thermal compost pile just waiting to be screened, and can order anything...I theoretically shouldn't need anything else however is my take, and so I'm asking more knowledgable persons than myself on here, is 1 cup good enough for maybe 3 day veg to get over transplant shock then 8-10 week flower? Thanks in advance good people

 

[RustyShcklfrd]

At least where Im from, there is no legal definition for top soil, so companies can and almost always do sell, a pretty bland blend of topsoil and subsoil, and it pretty much always is crap. The thing is 90% of topsoil they sell is going to be spread 2 or 3 inches thick, seeded, and have 20-10-10 dumped on it so i guess it doesnt matter. At least around here, the top soil isnt the problem, its what they pretend is topsoil.

 

[reppin2c]

Vita...whatever-don't recycle anything higher K like banana peels. I just use kelp to fill the blank K wise.

Top soil from the snake river bottom was plenty just add mulch. In CO at way over a mile high doesn't have thelife to digest what is present. I don't know what they call top soil where anyone is from but when I moved here there was a "I got it figured out" mentality. It's not way off minerally but much is to be desired

 

[Tactical Farmer]

Are there any analysis results from pure peat, even better promix ?

Michael said it would be best if the peat and compost were tested seperatly since mixing the two then testing would make the results less clear.

 

[TheyCallMeJJay]

Are there any analysis results from pure peat, even better promix ?

Michael said it would be best if the peat and compost were tested seperatly since mixing the two then testing would make the results less clear.

That would be nice. I wonder if we can get the analysis for free from the producers?

I've gotten tests back from a few lots and it's looking like I need to cut my soil to bring things down. Evidently I've used too much dolomitic lime over time.

 

[xmobotx]

inasmuch as any dolo is too much unless you've had a test tell you there's a need for mag ~it's truly plentiful

 

[orechron]

@Tactical Farmer
I had an analysis done on raw peat but it came in on the 3rd page of a report from logan and I don't know how to attach only the third page of the file. Here are the numbers however:

TEC - 14.38
pH - 4.3
O-matter - 91.38
S - 8 ppm
P2O5 - 25 lbs/acre
Ca - 1155 lbs/acre
Mg - 423 lbs/acre
K - 62 lbs/acre
Na - 20 lbs/acre
Ca% - 19.47
Mg% - 11.89
K% - 0.54
Na% - 0.30
H% - 59.00
B - 0.22
Fe - 26
Mn - 9
Cu - <0.2
Zn - 0.71

I had everything tested separately because I was worried I wouldn't get to test a homogenous sample with the end mix. Xmobotx is right, Mg is rarely low enough to worry about. I think I've only used 100lbs of dolomite in my life.

 

[neverforget4/20]

@Tactical Farmer
I had an analysis done on raw peat but it came in on the 3rd page of a report from logan and I don't know how to attach only the third page of the file. Here are the numbers however:

TEC - 14.38
pH - 4.3
O-matter - 91.38
S - 8 ppm
P2O5 - 25 lbs/acre
Ca - 1155 lbs/acre
Mg - 423 lbs/acre
K - 62 lbs/acre
Na - 20 lbs/acre
Ca% - 19.47
Mg% - 11.89
K% - 0.54
Na% - 0.30
H% - 59.00
B - 0.22
Fe - 26
Mn - 9
Cu - <0.2
Zn - 0.71

I had everything tested separately because I was worried I wouldn't get to test a homogenous sample with the end mix. Xmobotx is right, Mg is rarely low enough to worry about. I think I've only used 100lbs of dolomite in my life.

O, do you think those values would be consistent for peat harvested in different places? Curious about how much the source effects the makeup of the bailed peat product.

Did you use calcium carbonate to bring that peat into the desired range? If so how did you calculate for the pH you desired?

Thanks

 

[m_astera]

Average peat moss analysis

Average peat moss analysis

@Tactical Farmer
I had an analysis done on raw peat but it came in on the 3rd page of a report from logan and I don't know how to attach only the third page of the file. Here are the numbers however:

TEC - 14.38
pH - 4.3
O-matter - 91.38
S - 8 ppm
P2O5 - 25 lbs/acre
Ca - 1155 lbs/acre
Mg - 423 lbs/acre
K - 62 lbs/acre
Na - 20 lbs/acre
Ca% - 19.47
Mg% - 11.89
K% - 0.54
Na% - 0.30
H% - 59.00
B - 0.22
Fe - 26
Mn - 9
Cu - <0.2
Zn - 0.71

I had everything tested separately because I was worried I wouldn't get to test a homogenous sample with the end mix. Xmobotx is right, Mg is rarely low enough to worry about. I think I've only used 100lbs of dolomite in my life.

Hi All-

Been gone for a few months, diving back in now to catch up with this thread.

I've had peat moss analyzed a number of times, and the results above are typical.

pH ~5.0
Ca saturation 20-30%
Mg saturation 10-20%
K saturation 0.5%

organic matter percentage varies a lot, don't know why that is unless it's a function of using scoop volume vs weight, but I've seen everything from 30% OM to 90% OM like above.

Worth noting that unlike clay, which has a fixed CEC, organic matter complexes like peat, humus, and compost have a variable CEC. When they are highly acidic, say below pH 5.5, many of the negative exchange sites can be occupied by Aluminum+++ or H+. As the pH rises these sites will become available to be filled by exchangeable base cations like Ca, Mg, K, Na, and NH4 and the CEC will rise significantly.

 

[Ratzilla]

Welcome back Michael.
Let me be the first to wish you and yours a MERRY CHRISTMAS and Happy New Year!
Ratzilla

 

[50YardLine]

Yes, welcome back Michael. Merry Christmas to you.

Those reports on peat are good news for me and my soil. It appears adding peat with those numbers would improve my soil in both ph, and lowering my overall P and K.

 

[m_astera]

Welcome back Michael.
Let me be the first to wish you and yours a MERRY CHRISTMAS and Happy New Year!
Ratzilla

Thank you kindly, Ratzilla. All the best to you and yours as well.

Michael

 

[m_astera]

So this talk of cec leads me to another question.

I know out container "soil' weighs less the garden soil so I understand the decreasing of the recommendation s given by labs but with our high cec don't we have a bigger wearhouse to store nutrients.

Or does the soil test already take that into account?

I'm replying to this question from page 7 of this thread. I think it's #106.

CEC is supposed to be a measure of negative charge per weight or mass of soil, not volume of soil. The original formulation/measurement was the amount of - (negatively) charged sites that would be able to adsorb the + positive charges of 1 milligram of Hydrogen H+.

If 100 grams of soil has enough available negative charges to adsorb and retain 1 mg worth of H+ ions, that soil has a Cation Exchange Capacity of 1 milligram equivalent, or 1 meq. If it has enough negative sites to adsorb the positive charges of 15 mg of H+, then it has a CEC of 15 meq.

This same 1 meq soil could hold 23 times that mass of Sodium Na+ (because Na has an atomic weight of 23), or 20 times that mass of Calcium Ca++ (because Ca has an atomic weight of 40, and a double + charge).

A soil with a CEC of 1 meq can adsorb
1 mg of H+ ions
20 mg of Calcium Ca++ (atomic weight 40)
12 mg of Magnesium++ (atomic weight 24)
23 mg of Sodium Na+ (atomic weight 23)
39 mg of Potassium K+ (atomic weight 39)

These concepts and their importance are explained in detail in chapter 2 of The Ideal Soil, or if you don't have the book, at the s**********s.com website

...with our high cec don't we have a bigger wearhouse to store nutrients.

Or does the soil test already take that into account?

Ideally the soil test should take that into account, but there seems to be a problem with the labs using volume measurements instead of weight. More on this as we go along.

 

[m_astera]

Their AEA plus package is a good deal. I get that, plus C:N and Si, and paste. Comes out around 75 I think

HD (reply to post #195)

You were answering a question about Logan Labs testing above, and bring up the paste test again. I quoted this one because the other mentions of the paste test were in much longer posts.

At the risk of offending some or many, I find the paste test (simple water extraction) to be useless for balancing soil minerals via the Albrecht or Ideal Soil methods. Why? Because it simply doesn't matter in most cases how much of a given element is soluble in H2O. P will always be low because P is barely soluble in water. Na and S will always be high because both are readily soluble in water. The problem is that the paste test is not measuring CEC, not measuring base cation saturation ratios, and not measuring mineral availability to plant roots or microbes.

Plant roots exude various acids such as citric, malic and carbonic, and we are told that the soil immediately adjacent to roots will have an average pH of 4.8. For that reason, the Morgan soil test extractant and some others are adjusted to pH 4.8, and it is claimed that these tests measure readily available minerals/nutrients in the root zone. Other sources tell us that fungal hyphae have been shown to exude acids as strong as pH 2.0, hence their ability to etch P from hard rocks. The point is that plants and microbes do not rely at all on what may be available at a pH of 7 in water.

Albrecht stated very clearly that water soluble nutrients were not at all an important factor in growing crops, and spent some time railing against schools of agronomy that insisted on rating fertilizers by their solubility in water. In many of Albrecht's groundbreaking experiments, he grew plants in clay and sand mixtures from which all traces of water soluble nutrients had been leached out.

Bill McKibben, house agronomy consultant for Logan labs, wrote a book called The Art of Balancing Soil Minerals in which he popularized the paste test. Why? As far as I can tell, because many of the clients he worked with in the upper Midwest had sandy soils with grains of undissolved calcium carbonate in them. Most of McKibben's clients are corn and soybean farmers or golf courses, not horticulturalists, gardeners, or cannabis growers. After reading McKibben's book I concluded that he didn't understand or really use the Albrecht ratios and had not studied or applied the Ideal Soil ratios at all. Because he didn't understand or apply the importance of BCSR, and ran into problems when trying to apply the Albrecht concepts on soils with free carbonates, he found a crutch that allowed him to get some results.

Undissolved Ca or Mg carbonates in the soil will throw off a Mehlich 3 estimate of CEC by extracting too much Ca and Mg. The answer is to use the ammonium acetate pH8.2 test in addition to the M3 test, as the high pH AA8.2 extractant will not dissolve the free carbonates, it will only displace the adsorbed cations. The AA8.2 test results will give an accurate estimate of true CEC while the M3 test results will tell us the potential availability of the elements.

But Logan labs has not gotten the message, and still today people send me Logan labs reports that include the paste test along with the M3. They are wasting their money, and I tell them so. The only value I can see in the paste test is as an indicator of excess free carbonates in an acid soil, but that will generally show up as a very high level of Ca in the M3 test anyway, and a false high estimate of CEC. One will still need the AA8.2 test to get an accurate estimate of CEC.

Finally, and worst of all, neither McKibben nor anyone else seems to have any idea what sort or amount of amendments should be added to rectify an imbalance in minerals shown on the paste test, so what good is it?

 

[milkyjoe]

It don't mean a thing...but I totally agree with that post. If I can't induce enough microbal activity to make minerals available...well then I ain't a grower anyways.

Now c:n ratio that is another story entirely. Happy to spend the money for thar one