You're pH of 7.6 really isn't too bad for most vegetables but a downward adjustment would increase nutrient availability and, most likely, yield. I would add sulfur prior to the next cropping cycle. I would do about 15 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft. tilled to a depth of 6 to 8 inches. That will adjust your pH downward over time and it will happen pretty dang slowly. Remember that lime buffers against that change and since you have a lot of it, you're soil is strongly buffered. Clay is another thing that will buffer against pH changes and if you have a clay soil, that will also work against your downward pH adjustment. Another test next year to see where you're at would be in order. For nitrogen, as mentioned above, blood meal would be a good choice. 10 to 15 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft. tilled to the same depth should be about right for new plants. If you're looking for one material that that will provide nitrogen while acidifying, blood meal will do virtually nothing, particularly considering your buffering capacity. You would have to move to synthetics to do what you have in mind. Two options would be ammonium sulfate (21-0-0) and sulfur coated urea, which is usually around (40-0-0). Ammonium sulfate = fast release, sulfur coated urea = slow release. Good rates would be 7 lbs. and 5 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft., respectively. Both of those would also give your sulfur level a little boost as well. But be aware that the pH change would rely on regular re-application of those acidifying fertilizers over a very loooooong time (again, buffer). The sulfur really would be a better route for you. On a side note, as your instincts have already told you, BER is not always due to low calcium in the soil. Un-even watering (too wet, followed by too dry, repeat) is usually what leads to the problem. Yes, it's a calcium deficiency in the tissue but variances in water availability to the plant plays a major role in the uptake of that nutrient.

Why the drama? Because in 2006, Spike, the originator of Gardenweb, sold out to iVillage. Spike had his hands extremely full and was not as able to police the project like iVillage was. In 2007 iVillage/Gardenweb banned people for life because they proselytized and linked to a new lawn forum which sprung up. Gardenweb made the use of that new forum's name a banned word in their dictionary. Then another forum popped up when that first alternate forum proved to be too authoritarian. This next forum got that same treatment where the use of the word was not allowed here. That forum has been renamed to the one you linked to. Apparently Gardenweb has not caught on to the new name. In any case it is usually a violation of the terms of service of any forum containing commercial advertising to link out to forums with similar themes. The advertisers don't want to make it easy to click yourself away from their messages. So this minor drama is how we avoid the major drama and trauma. Many lawn gurus do not post here because of a history between 2002 and 2007 of off topic arguments. It was not unusual to see simple questions go up to the 100-post limit with sometimes vicious bantering back and forth. Sadly some really competent people left or were banned. Myself, Andy, texas weed, bpgreen, turf toes, and a few others have managed to keep our noses just clean enough to avoid the Gardenweb ban hammer. But they mostly stay away from here. That's partly why Andy does not read soil test results here.

toxcrusadr-- the *path* is supposedly 8' wide, not the spreader. And the path does seem to be... I didn't stop to measure it though : ) If that sounds funny though, I wonder if that's why I ran out of fertilizer sooner than I expected to... I'm not sure I'm up to all that calculating-- can I assume though that the higher the number, the more grains it puts out at once? The people at the store (who seem very knowledgeable, I mean) said that I want one bag to cover a quarter acre. Which I think is about the amount of grass we have, maybe a bit more. We have a tiny bit over a half acre total but that of course includes the house/pool/driveway/pavers out back etc. Regardless, that bag lasted for a bout 1/3 of my grass. I went back for 2 more bags and changed the setting on the spreader-- think from 8 to 6 and got some more range out of it. Still had to open the third bag though. Sigh. Maybe I should look for a highly rated spreader and buy that. This one was borrowed from my brother-in-law and I think I have found it online and if I'm right about which it is (the Scotts classic drop spreader), I see that it gets bad reviews, lots of them. Same reasons. I'm learning a lot of lessons lately, the hard way... Isn't that supposed to be the best way though? Or something. Oh and just FYI, that's only one of several bare patches. And there are plenty of weeds, trust me. It's hard to tell from this one picture but they are everywhere, all kinds. Some areas have less but some areas are also straight weeds so it all balances out, ha.

Sharon, Normally everything in clay is high because clay is high in minerals. At least you have a pretty decent soil pH. I think most state labs mainly just test for N-P-K and soil pH on the basic soil test. Were you wrong to expect more for $10? Probably, because (unfortunately) $10 doesn't buy you much any more. To get a soil tilth analysis you have to use someone like the private soil lab in Edinburgh, Texas and you have to be willing to pay for it. To understand the tilth and texture of my soil in various parts of our property, I just used the jar soil test when we finished building the house and moved here. I already knew that only the soil in our woodland had adequate organic matter, so didn't even really need the jar soil test to tell me that, but I used it to help me understand what percentage of our soil was clay, sand, and silt. The soil on our property varied a great deal from one area to another with very little uniformity, so I did a separate soil jar test in each area so I could understand the challenges of planting in the back yard (which had a clayey-sandy blend) versus the front and side yards (extremely dense red clay from which you could make clay flower pots) versus the veggie garden area (sandy-silty along one edge, then sandy-clayey from there down to the middle of the garden, and dense clay for the remaining half of the garden. After that,I then knew what plants would tolerate the soil in each area of the yard based on their adaptability to heavy clay versus sand/silt with little clay, and also knew which parts of the garden had the worst soil and needed the most amendment. If I had followed standard soil testing procedures and dug up soil from the various areas, mixed it together I wouldn't have learned much about the tilth in my various areas because I would have mixed it all up together. I think the best way to understand the tilth/texture in a specific area is to do the jar soil test. If your soil is uniform on your property, one jar test is all you need, but I don't really know how a person would know if their soil was uniformly the same without doing a jar soil test from several different areas just to establish that. In our sandy/silty area I couldn't keep anything alive in the drought of 2003 because I hadn't added enough organic matter to that area and it just wouldn't hold enough moisture even with heavy irrigation. Because I had been amending that soil for 4 years before the drought of 2003, it was disheartening to feel like 4 years of soil improvement hadn't helped much. We've been here 14 years now, and that area did much better in the droughts of 2011 and 2012, but I still feel like it doesn't have enough organic matter, and maybe it never will, though it is not for lack of trying on my part. Understanding the soil you have in a specific part of your yard or garden can be very difficult if that area differs from the other areas you have planted. With highly variable soil like mine, it drives me crazy. Ultimately, though, the lesson I have taken from trying to grow stuff here is that you have to add organic matter all the time. I don't mean that you have to rototill it into the soil---just piling OM on top of the ground inproves it over time. I decided a long time ago to follow Mother Nature's Lead. How does she build soil? By letting organic matter fall to the ground, pile up, and decompose---no rototilling to dig it in, etc. When I walk down into our woodland, which has an estimated age of 60-80 years, depending on who you talk to here and what they remember about how this land was farmed, the first 8 or so inches of soil are black, humusy and rich. Down beneath? Same old red clay in some areas and silty/sandy soil in others. How did that black, rich, humusy soil get there? Just from organic matter decaying there over the decades. Did your soil test address your Cation Exchange Capacity at all? It might have been abbreviated as C.E.C. That usually is included in soil tests, though I haven't had a lab soil test in many years so don't know if they still tell you the C.E.C. on the basic test or not. C.E.C. is one bit of info from soil testing that I find helpful. A lab like the private soil testing lab in Edinburgh, Texas, can do many kinds of tests, including testing one's soil for heavy metals, boron, etc. but it is not an inexpensive process, and the more testing that is done, the higher the fee. As a landowner who is not a farmer, I probably wouldn't spend this kind of money on a soil test unless I had problems I couldn't solve on my own without such a test. The kind of testing they do is aimed more at folks who farm. If I had extremely sandy soil, I might find I needed that more complicated and expensive testing because it is very hard to turn almost pure sand (I am not talking about sandy loam, but about sugar sand and the like) into fertile sandy loam. Because you have to do heroic amounts of soil amending to fix sugar sand, the in-depth testing from private soil labs could be very helpful. The best thing you can do for any soil is to continually add organic matter to it year in and year out, and to not overfeed it with nutrients that can build up in your soil. Too much of one nutrient, for example, can interfere with plants' ability to take up and use other nutrients. Also, I think that everyone tends to focus on N-P-K too much, and often people don't think about the micronutrients. If you're adding lots of organic matter, you'll have the micronutrients in the right proportions. However, in the early years while still improving the soil, I use lots of Espoma organic fertilizers because they do include the micronutrients. I still use them after the soil is highly improved, but at lower rates. Crape myrtles, by the way, generally do well in clay. Just by piling on compost and bark mulch year after year, you will be putting enough organic matter on the ground around the crape myrtles to keep them happy. I grew beautiful crape myrtles in Texas black gumbo clay and never did one thing to the soil. The crape myrtles only got nitrogen fertilizer when we fed the yard anually with a pelleted nitrogen-only soil fertilizer. Over the years, the mulch will decompose and earthworms and other little critters, as well as rainfall, will carry the nutrients from your mulch/compost down into the soil. Hope this helps, Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Soil Jar Test for Texture