I ever thought I would ssy this but you do need to cut back on adding organic mater to your soil, you simply have too much. you need between 6 and 6 percent OM. Your soil ph is also too high, optimal is between 6.2 and 6.8 percent. Other than not adding more OM there is nothing you need do except wait for the soil bacteria to work.

Can you give a little information about the physical characteristics and topographic location of soil in your garden. Typically, to achieve such a high percentage of soil organic matter in your soil you need either cold temperatures or oxygen limiting conditions from a high water table.

I see you're in zone 5B. What sort of amendments do you incorporate per annum? From the soil test, it looks like your soil is chalk full 'o nutrients. I wouldn't add any sort of fertilizer for this year. Test annually and add only the nutrients that are deficient.

You could probably add more O.M. depending on your climate. If you get plentiful rainfall and are rarely water stressed, add O.M. only as surface mulch for a year or two. If you receive less rainfall and think the increased O.M. could improve water holding capacity, go ahead and keep incorporating O.M.

Organic soils were initially difficult to make productive because copper was often deficient. Copper is sorbed very tightly by humus. Once this was understood, organic soils (Histosols) were made very productive after Cu was added. Your soil report indicates that copper is not limiting. I wouldn't worry too much about high O.M. leading to Cu deficiency.

Another problem was drainage. Organic soils are usually found in wet areas and need to be ditched for contemporary cultivation. Once drained, primary and secondary subsidence would lead to a lowering of the land surface and loss of O.M. My guess is that your garden isn't in a very wet spot. If otherwise, you may want to move upland.

Take any advice you receive at face value. You know what your land is like, and are probably the most qualified to make management decisions. Good luck.

Looking at your O.M., potassium, phosphorus and boron numbers I'm gonna guess that you use a lot of manure. I'm personally not a big fan of manure because of the salts and boron. You might have naturally high boron and/or P/K where you are but I'm gonna stick with my hunch unless informed otherwise.

A boron value greater than 1.0 ppm is high enough to cause a broad range of plants to show symptoms of boron toxicity. Your are at more than 5 times that level. (I'm gonna take another wild guess and say that their 'E' stands for 'excessive') The symptoms vary from plant to plant because it's mobile in some plants and not in others but one common thread in vegetables is reduced yield. The higher the number, the more severe the effect on yield. Unfortunately boron is very difficult to leach and you'll probably always have a problem with it.

Here's another fun fact. You're pH is higher than preferred but if you do anything to decrease it, like incorporating soil sulfur, you'll put more boron into solution, making it more available to plants. That would increase boron toxicity problems. Ta da! Welcome to the wonderful word of boron! Did your soil test say anything about salinity? I bet that's a fun number too.

For now don't add anything (K:Mg ratio is the least of your worries at this point), pick crops with tolerance to boron in the soil and cross your fingers. You might want to try running a few very thorough leaching irrigations to at least try to flush some of that boron out of the root zone. (But don't get your hopes up too high). If you decide to do that, the O.M. will keep the soil wet for a long time so make sure to give it plenty of time to dry out a little bit between irrigations to avoid creating anaerobic soil conditions. Also, leaching irrigations will just run off of a saturated soil, which won't do you any good. Surface and subsoil drainage have to be sufficient to allow water to move through the soil profile for leaching to be effective. If drainage is impeded, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Also, are you sure you copied down your base saturation percentages correctly? I don't see sodium but you can usually calculate the percentage of one of the base forming cations by subtracting the known values from 100 but even without sodium, yours add up to over 117%. You'll sometimes see 99% or 101% including all base forming cations plus hydrogen due to rounding errors but greater than 117 means something is wonky there.

Here's another thing to consider. Are you sure it was a good representative sample? Lets say you added something like, oh....I don't know...manure? And then you grabbed your sample from one spot in the garden. If you picked up a big slug of manure in the sample, you could get falsely high values. Then everything we've been talking about wouldn't count for bupkis. When collecting a soil sample, it should be a composite of soil collected from the entire depth of the root zone at multiple locations.

In detail, how did you take your soil sample? I.E. depth, number of locations, size of area covered, prior cropping history including amendments and fertilizer applications.

Hello all,

Thanks for the replies. It is a rather unique situation as the area was once a cattle holding pen, as recently as last summer. As a result, there are large areas that have copius amounts of manure at the surface level. Perhaps one of my sample holes was too close to the manure pile and/or I accidentally grabbed a large chunk of manure in the sample. Regardless, I think that the OM is pretty substantial and I don't think I will be adding the 1/2"-1" of compost that I normally do (this is a new area for me).

Thanks for the advice regarding the boron. I was not aware of that as being a problem. I guess anything in excess is a problem of sorts.

"you need between 6 and 6 percent OM."

Just a typo, but maybe clarify those numbers?

Aaaahhhh... that makes lots of sense. If the entire area use to hold cattle, the chemistry is probably pretty bad throughout. Your salts are likely through the roof too, due to the manure itself and considering the fact that you were getting more than just manure out of those cows. If you get lots of rain (and I have no idea what your weather is like) a lot of the salts will eventually leach out of the active root zone over time. However, boron will probably remain high for a long time, even if you do get a lot of rain. Also, as salts leach out of the top foot or two of soil they have to go somewhere and the subsoil will become (and probably already is) very saline.
What we do with old stock yards and dairy farms around here before switching the land use to food crops or development is "flip" the soil. (Unfortunately, it's usually the latter rather than the former) Earth movers start at one end of the property and dig a trench about 10 ft deep (because that's generally about how low you need to dig get past the salts). Then they'll pick up the top foot of soil from the other end of the project and drop it into the hole, putting the "topsoil" ten feet under. They'll continue until the original hole is filled and there's another 10 foot trench on the opposite side of the property .....repeat until ten feet of the soil profile has been flipped on its head. As you might guess, that's a very expensive process and if there was an easier/cheaper way to get old cattle country ready for other plants, you bet they would go the easier/cheaper route.
If you get tons of rains, the soil may be halfway decent after a few years. If you don't get tons of rain and you want to grow anything other than plants that have a very high tolerance for salts and boron, you might want to consider soil removal and replacement.

I'm hardly qualified to argue in the sense that I have never had experience with this type of land conversion, but it seems a little extreme to me. All people I have talked to have commented on how fertile the soil will be in a cattle run. I guess there are things going on in the soil that many may not be aware of, but it definitely seems counter-intuitive.

Before I started reading the replies I thought you had turned in way too much manure the previous fall.

Not sure exactly where you are, but here In the West, manure isn't the best addition, and here SE of Denver we don't use animal manures on our property because we don't want the pH any higher than it already is. And we don't want the salts either.

Eventually some of the minerals will work themselves out. If you want to start this year you might have some issues with yields and plant health - you'll be working to make food crops happy.

You want to get your pH down and use some of those things like Zn and Mn. And the OM might be a little high for your soil, but that'll work itself out too. IMO you'll want to delay a garden this year and plant something to start working the soil. Since I doubt you can't count on lots of heavy rains to wash some of this stuff out, you have to use plants to do the work. Not sure of your situation or the size of the planned garden area, but maybe a cover crop of red clover or vetch (altho you'll be finding vetch for a couple years in your garden, but that's a decent tradeoff in my view). . Maybe some sunflowers or a couple of grasses. Something to get biological activity. You also want to lower the pH by the locally-used method: sulfur or whatever the farmers use (feasibility and price). I'm not sure how much you should turn the soil over, as I'm not sure of your situation (irrigation, slope, money, etc), but whatever price point you can go, there is a solution, and if you go the sulfur route, use only a setting on the tiller that stays above, say, 8 in./20 cm.

Dan

Well, I had raised my concerns with the person who did my soil test (btw, anyone looking for a soil analysis in Ontario would be well suited to go with AGTest in Guelph for the customer service alone...link included below) and here is the response that I received:

Hello Michael,

Although the boron was quite high at 5 ppm, it shouldnt have an adverse effect on most vegetables. Certainly do not apply any more. With your pH well above 7, it is less available to the plant. Boron can also leach from the soil, so rainfall or a thorough dousing of irrigation that saturates the root zone will help take some away, depending on the subsurface drainage ability.

That said, some crops are sensitive to B, such as peas and beans. Boron toxicity symptoms include yellow leaf tips and margins, and often interveinal chlorosis (yellowing of leaf veins). Beets and turnips will thrive and may also help to draw down the B levels.

Tillage probably wonÂt make much of a difference, but it may help incorporate accumulated surface nutrients into the soil profile. However, not tilling has many benefits such as maintaining soil structure and porosity (drainage and water holding capacity), not disturbing microbial life, not bringing weed seeds to the surface, etc. Although a nicely tilled seed-bed will help germination and plant establishment.

You could go ahead and plant, and if any funny symptoms occurred, such as leaf yellowing, we could do a Âcomplete plant tissue test for $24. Plant tissue analysis gives a value to the amount of micronutrients in the plant, as opposed to a soil test which only measures how much is available to the plant.

We could do a total salts (EC) test, but I would guess that with Calcium at 5000, salts wonÂt be an issue (above 1.00).

Your sampling technique seems sound, and shouldnÂt have influenced the results in any way. If you desire further tests, we should have enough soil remaining to perform them.

Hopefully this helps, and as usual, sunshine, heat, moisture, and weed control will all play roles in your gardening success.

Jack

So, I think I will give it a try this season and see how it goes. I'm not using the entire area so I had planned on vetch in the remainder of the corral anyways.