Nice soil. This is one rare case where organic matter will add OM, P and K in a single shot. A truck of manure is what you need.

Looks decent! I'm like you, I would stay organic.. If it was me, I would add compost/manure and some woodash.. Woodash is not only good for potassium but for trace minerals as well! Be careful with adding blood/bone meal - the animals dignmy crops up If I add anything like that! I stick to compost and woodash!

Goodluck,
Joe

Any recommendations for how much manure to put on, esp if I'll be adding ~1 cubic yard of leaf compost?

Your soil test indicates that your soil is good enough that all you need do is add about 1/2 inch of compost/leaf mold/rabbit manure over the garden.
With a soil pH of 6.4 do not add any wood ash since that is 25 percent Calcium Carbonate and will very quickly change your soils pH to something much higher which could cause problems you do not want.
A good level of organic matter is in the range of 6 to 8 percent so your soil test indicates you are a bit low and adding more organic matter, as mulches, will be of great benefit.

I prefer 1 inch myself. Leaf mold is a nice conditioner but light in nutrients, I use it heavily because my soil is too high in nutrients (too much compost, P is about 90 ppm from 7ppm originally). It depends also on what you will grow. You may consider one inch leaf mold where you will grow beans, carrots and parsnips, 1 inch manure everywhere else. Wood ash can be added sparingly, for 300sqft, no more than a few pounds, why change a pH that is near perfect. It is true that you have high Ca, but where I am Ca is four times as high (most of it from the geology, not from compost), and I get good crops.

compost adds trace amounts of nutrients. Are you all liberal nut jobs trying to push an agenda? If you would like, I could bombard this page with links, including scholarly, that indicate compost has many benefits, but adding NPK is not one of them. The NPK numbers for a typical compost would be somewhere around 0.5-0.5-0.5

http://www.ibiblio.org/rge/course/compost.htm

Calculate how much of that NPK would be added if one applied 2000 pounds of premium compost.

Scholarly links are only as good as the person trying to interpret them. I doubt any of them would state that no nutrients are contained within compost.

Lloyd

who is going to tell Henderson that 0.5% of one ton is 11 pounds?

Are we talking about dry matter compost or water saturated when we talk about a ton?

Dry matter, it would be more like 2/1/2, so I assume 0.5% was a quote for moist compost. But regardless, 0.5% of a ton is always 11 lbs, and the OP only needs to add 3.5 lbs of P, as per the original post. For this site, 300 sqft of beds, probably half a ton is fine. That happens to be less than one inch of compost over 300 sqft.

Let me be very specific about what half a ton of moist compost (50% H2O) would do:

- it would provide 5 lbs of P, increasing the P content to about 90 ppm in the first foot of soil. That is even above optimal, but obviously there will be some leaching,

- K goes to 210 ppm, high but good

- OM goes to about 6.6%, ideal

- N will be enough for one growing season

All this with a single action, whereas that stupid soil report produces four different recipes to deal with these deficiencies. I certainly overdid it in the past (my 2200 sqft garden has received three times as much compost per square foot as I am suggesting here, and my OM% is 21%), but there is a reason people are so fond of compost as a cure all. It cures all.

Wow, Glib, you've managed to create your own everglades muck, haven't you?

From the test numbers the OP soil likely received dolomitic lime for many years. Seems like adding woodash would not be ideal because it would push Ca even higher.

Not sure about that, PN. My orchard has three times as much Ca as the OP, and 2.5 times the Mg, and never received anything. My current garden has four times the Ca, and four times the Mg, did receive compost and some wood ash. Ca (and Mg) often is just the mother rock. Our city water, 50% from wells, has a pH of 9.2, which again is probably from the geology.

Wow, thanks for the fantastic information everyone. It sounds like my plan of 1 cubic yard of compost + rabbit manure should do the job. I admit I was surprised to have such good results. I will be adding rabbit manure (either directly or through tea) throughout the season, so nitrogen definitely shouldn't be an issue.

To be honest, I'm not sure if the area has been limed--this is our first year planting here. The existing bed hasn't been cared much in quite a few years, so if it was limed, it wasn't recently. I was honestly expecting to have to lime myself, since the whole area is bordered on one side by some sizable hemlocks.

I'm actually interested to see if any of the seeds I randomly threw down among some bushes in the back will actually grow. Because it's wooded, it's never been mown, so there are lots of decaying leaves and what looks like very rich soil as a result. I figured some shade-tolerant plants (kale, collards, lettuce, spinach, peas) might be happy there. Best case, my bunnies will happily eat whatever is grown. Worst case, I used seeds which I already have too many of anyway.

There's also a HUGE compost pile, but I have no idea what to do with it. It's all yard waste and hasn't been tended. Our landlords have just haphazardly thrown everything in there from leaves and grass (good) to gigantic branches (bad). Digging out the good stuff on the bottom might require a backhoe...

If you have the huge compost pile, and the rabbit manure, and the branches, you are all set. All you need is a wheelbarrow. Google hugelkultur to find out what you can do with the branches (bury them in the beds). They will provide P and K forever, humic acids forever, and small amounts of N after the first year. You will see that your plants dig their roots into them. They also improve the water retention of the soil.

The first soil test I had done some 40 years ago indicated my soil, Lake Michigan beach sand, had a pH of 5.7 and Phosphorus and Potash was low optimum. After adding nothing but compost I made (shredded leaves and other vegetative waste, 3 parts, horse manure, 1 part,) the next soil test, 4 years later, indicated that soil had a pH of 7.2 and P and K were at high optimum and everything else was in balance. Because the nutrients in compost are not readily available testing does not indicate what must be totally in the compost.
Other places and with different soil types give much the same results.

Henderson, you must be one of those rare gardeners who's kind of an arrogant jerk. Soil amendments and gardening do not require ad hominem attacks.

I got some scholarly test data here on my own garden, which I added pretty much just compost to for 20 years, and now the P and K are so high I'm going to have to stop. Stick that in your watering can. :-]

Bunny poo is great for gardens from what I have read. It's not hot, and has many needed elements(for plants)

"Other places and with different soil types give much the same results."

At risk of seeming like one of those arrogant jerks, perhaps, but I must ask you Kim, how can you back up that kind of absolutist statement? It sounds a lot like you are saying that in any climate/soil suite 4 years of adding compost made from native OM will raise ph almost two orders of magnitude and significantly increase P and K.

All I can really know is from my own direct experience, and that would indicate that your statement is incorrect. I have added very large amounts of compost for longer periods of time, plus limestone rock and more without moving ph that much or even close.

Mr. Brown. I have done the same thing in Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, southern California, and have had many people in many other places around the world do what I have done here and they all tell me they have gotten results similar to what I have gotten here. The pH of the soil in southern California went from 7.8/8.2 to 7.2 with the addition of adequate amounts of organic matter.
So, what is the humus level in your soil?
What is your soils pH?
How well does your soil drain?
How well does your soil retain moisture?
What kind of life is in your soil?

Please spare me the newbie questions, sir. You know that I have been here a long time.

Not apropos of nothing, but why would someone want to drive their ph to above optimum for food crops anyway? Soil should be slightly acidic so as to maximize flow of nutrients.