Ah well. Thought it might interest other folks, but I guess not. :)

All the best,
-Patrick

That is a huge and interesting subject. I have no answers, but many questions, for instance how is it soil tests do not/can not measure nitrogen, because of its volatility, but it is possible to get a soil C:N test?

I think wikipedia is great but it leads in so many directions...some may never come back =)

I gotter get more sleep before I can answer coherently, Patrick :)

paulns, it is not that the labs cannot test for N, it is that the availability of N is so dependant on soil temperature that it is not something they test for anymore. Since N availability is dependant on soil temperature what does that say about the biological activty of soil?

Back in the 80s, my stepfather planted something that I had never seen before. It was a tiny, delicate, wispy, little plant called Cleome. He planted it in the sandy soil around his and my mother's new house. I loved it and determined to plant it the following year in my own garden. I planted it in the front of one of my flower beds. My heavily amended flower beds. My cleomes grew 6 feet high and each plant was about 4 feet wide. None of the plants in the back of that bed could be seen and eventually were smothered.

My other experience with nitrogen was something I mentioned here before. I convinced my husband to use fresh chicken manure, something that I had always used successfully. My husband, who never did anything in half measures, went out and got three dumptruckloads of chicken manure and dumped them at his end of the garden and left me to do the spreading. It took me about three weeks to get the manure spread. My half of the garden thrived. He couldn't grow a thing in his heavily saturated garden half. Everything he planted keeled over.

I don't know what it says, Kimmsr. Does it say spinach will grow in early spring only if nitrogen content of soil is at optimum levels because bacterial activity is low, or some such intelligent sounding answer? Do you know why it is possible to get C:N tested but not N?

annp, it served him right.

Your husband, I mean. He didn't deserve you. Speaking of nitrogen.
I haven't spread their bedding on the gardens yet but our chickens have been roaming the beds, eating worms and bugs and pooping, since nothing is planted yet. I and they will look back on these as halcyon days, pretty soon.

Nitrogen story.

My neighbors (good friends) have a gorgeous home on the inside. The husband is a homebuilder and builds million dollar homes. He constantly remodels his own home and has made it far more upscale than others in the neighborhood.

However, they are not gardenders. They have a few beds with a few shrubs, and buy a few flowers to interplant there every year. I decided I should dress it up, and planted some of my wintersown seedlings in their yard. These were tiny plants, one or two true leaves. I could hardly plant, found years worth of stacked up layers of wood mulch, never hit real soil. There were lots of grubs, but no worms. I told him he should add some organic N source to help the layers break down. He wouldn't use grass clippings, so I said "a little blood meal". He bought multiple huge sacks of it and dumped it in those beds. The nasturtuim were huge with foliage, few blossoms. Nothing bloomed well, but all plants were huge. 6 ft. berbena bonariensis, 4 ft verbascum southern charm, 4 ft rudbeckia, 6 ft. tomatoes. Nothing bloomed very well...

Just too much nitrogen, and not enough of any other nutrient I suspect. My seedlings survived though, and are back this year. Evidence that with organic fertilizers even if you go overboard, it's hard to kill plants.

Karen

Pure nitrogen is not available for plant use so it makes no sense to test for it other than its usefulness in generating a C:N ratio. Plant-available forms of nitrogen are nitrate and ammonium. Both are highly dependent on soil biology, temperature, soil moisture and soil structure. And both are highly mobile - nitrate through leaching (it is extremely soluble) and ammonium through volatization or loss to the atmosphere through denitrifcation. Testing for either of these will only reflect concentrations at the time of sampling and since they are so mobile, concentrations change rapidly and may be very different by the time you get the results back. That's why recommendations for adding nitrogen are typically triggered by the type of crop you are growing and are not test dependent.

Thanks gardengal, that helps. But then how are they able to test for C:N ratio?

A nitrogen story: There is only one other sizable 'farm' - a couple of acres - besides ours within an hour's drive of here. The man who owns it dumps bags of chemical fertilizer, ammonium nitrate I think, on it every year. His produce grows fast and big. And every year he is overun with weeds like quack grass, dandelions and lambs quarters. His strawberries grow in a sea of weeds, are good for a year before he ploughs them in and starts a new patch. He has even asked me, the organic fool, for advice on what to do. I know he won't give up the chemicals but I've suggested weeder geese, cover crops and mulches. We have very little weed problem. We mulch everything heavily and do a fair bit of hand weeding every year. But our produce grows far too slowly for my taste.

I'm starting to see a connection between weeds, nitrates, chemical fertilizers and why our greens grow so slowly.

Think I may have found this link from a poster here (maybe Kimmsr?) but regardless of the source, it's a good overview of nitrogen, especially in the context of organic farming & gardening.

All the best,
-Patrick

Sample quote: "Leaving soil idle can also waste nitrogen. The soil life mineralizes humus nitrogen throughout the growing season, and the nitrogen may leach or denitrify if no crop is present to take it up. The name of the game is use it or lose it, especially in humus-rich soils during warm moist weather."

Here is a link that might be useful: Ecologically Sound Nitrogen Management

Patrick, that article is written from the exact perspective I've been wanting to read about, or from, thanks. By the way, the first patch in my red clover rotation is 2 mm tall. How is yours doing? Have you smothered it yet?

Glad it helped Paul. :) There's a good article on humus on the same site, well worth saving and re-reading.

The clover is up over a foot tall here and looking beautiful and lush. No sign of flowers yet; apparently this is second-cut clover so it could be trimmed back once it begins to flower. A photographer friend may be visiting soon and if so I'll post a photo.

In that garden bed and others, I'm holding off on planting much of anything, because so far this month our night temperatures have been unusually low. Cucumbers especially seem to do better here when it's above 12C/55F overnight.

All the best,
-Patrick

Here is a link that might be useful: Humus: Still a Mystery

In a sentence, nitrogen is taken in by the plant to make amino acids (building blocks of protein).

Great links Mad, an excellent read.

You can search Nofa.org too!

Patrick said:

"And I think it could be helpful to many of us here, to talk about the specific N-P-K nutrients (and other nutrients) common in soil."

I became interested in soil nutrition after learning about "Producing High BRIX Plants". The technique is easy to follow, produces very good vegetables, and can be duplicated using fertilizers other than what the BRIX people offer for sale. They too endorse Steve Solomon, Elaine Ingham, and other people dedicated to organic gardening. However, after deeper research into their fertilizer I realized that they (BRIX) too had fallen into the conventional trap of advocating a limited usage of minerals (elements) for feeding plants that N-P-K synthetic chemical advocates had fallen into as well. Amending the soil with 15, 30, or 40 minerals (elements) falls about 75, 60, or 50 short in my understanding of full nutrition. Not that it is a bad thing; however, I would hate to be the one needing Iodine in my soil due to a lack of this nutrient in my soil, but nobody thought it important enough to put there or mention. My learning is in order to fix the food we must first fix the soil. Once the soil is healthy, the food it produces will offer health, and in the end the animal/human eating the food will be conferred said health. If the deed is to be done, why not do it right the first time and be done with it?

The question then becomes where can I get a full spectrum of minerals to put into the soil to insure maximum quality in the food I grow? This is where research and personal preference comes into play; after all, it is my garden, I am the one eating the food, and I will be the one reaping the benefits of this effort. I choose to use a seed meal (alfalfa), bone meal, calcium, seaweed, and sea salt finds. IMO, utilizing amendments from the ocean are the key to offering full spectrum of minerals (see Seaweed in Agriculture and SeaAgri Research that have given this gardener what he has been looking for with minimum cost and fits into the routine of amending the soil I feel comfortable with. IMO, each member may want to find out what is comfortable for their level of gardening; these amendments are what make my lips meet together in joy at dinnertime. The security in knowing all 90 minerals are there because I put them there is well worth the cost as far as I am concerned.

Finally, we come to where "the rubber meets the road" in this adventure, the soil. Without healthy soil not much of anything is going to result worth talking about, let alone eating. Amending any soil with quality compost is where one gets "butter from the duck". Yet, our understanding is clouded with fragmented information from many sources and personal preferences. However, there is one thing that is overlooked and not mentioned that has come to light. I must thank my friend and fellow member Althea for her interest when the subject was brought up last year, which tweaked my interest in the subject. Strange as it may seem it boils down to a matter of "teeth". Please bear with me as I attempt to explain.

We build compost piles with the end result being compost/humus that we spread on our soils. All the organic matter in the pile is consumed by the soil food web, yet for the most part none of the soil food web microbes possesses any "teeth" to consume the organic matter with. No, what they do is generate organic acids, enzymes, and other chemicals that pre-digest the carbon into a form that can then be consumed and converted to compost. That part of the matter that is slow to be consumed is converted to humus to be digested later or used for storage for any minerals (elements) that can be utilized later by the plant lucky enough to be planted in such a rich soil environment. It is these acids/chemicals that put the power in the soil and work the natural magic we see each season in our gardens/flowerbeds.

The link below leads to a web page that can better explain exactly what is going on within our compost piles and garden beds. Please entertain this member and assume what is being said about these acids/chemicals is true and working at this very moment within our compost piles and garden beds. The powers within these words are hard to believe, let alone the implications to what they can mean to our very health and existence. Yes, organic gardening is the answer we have already known to be true; now let us act like we know it and get to work

Blutranes

Nitrogen cycling is a fascinating topic to me, and can go so many different ways. One thing I would like to point out, however, is that from my perspective, nitrogen is a key component in building healthy soil. In particular, cases where the native soil is poor and the objective is to improve it as quickly as possible, nitrogen management is key. Why? Nitrogen is needed to build plant biomass, which then encourages the development of the soil food web and the further availability of other nutrients.

In other words, let's talk cover crops. When planting a cover crop in poor soil, that cover crop will not flourish without adequate nitrogen. Legumous cover crops may trap their own nitrogen (and I say "may" because much of the bacterial nitrates adhering to root nodules are not available to the host plant). Non-legumous cover crops will certainly benefit from a boost of additional nitrogen. Once given that nitrogenous shot in the arm, however, ecology takes over. Plant exudates and dead plant material feed microbes, microbes become food for other microbes, which get eaten by larger organisms, inorganic minerals are incorporated into the food chain, and the whole thing builds on itself until eventually you have healthy soil.

It's a chicken and egg thing. What comes first? Healthy plants or healthy soil? If you can import soil/compost into the system, then healthy soil probably comes first. But if all you have to work with is native poor soil, then the plants come first, along with a shot of nitrogen to get them off to a good start. This is why I like sod. I hate its environmental costs (grown with chemical fertilizers and trucked in over long distances), but I love the fact that it kick-starts poor soils as long as you give it a shot of nitrogen to get it established.

-Diggity

Let's not forget the most immediate source of N.

(The smaller person now emits N into the potty. We then, alas, dump the contents of the potty into the toilet and say bye-bye. We do not dump them on the Big Giant Leafpile, where they might do some small amount of good. I didn't want to complicate things at this delicate stage of development, but oh, the waste of N...)

(Hi Patrick!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Good followups everyone, thank you. :)

All the best,
-Patrick

(Hi Alfie!!!!)