Hi Raybo and thank you again for the intrest, you are the best authority when it comes to earthtainers and I appreciate the time you spend helping people figure this out. If this works for me I will try some snow peas and branch out to some other veggies. Fertilization of all the earthtainers is basicly the same. When box #1 was done I had the old directions (1.9) which I did not see starter fertilizer in the directions, the rest I could not find the starter fertilizers you recomended and wanted to plant as it was late and therefore did not use any figureing it had worked for you and others without starter fertilizer before and that was better than putting the wrong fertilizer in and burning the plants. In fact I only used 2 cups of dolomite per box on boxes 1-4, then I noticed you had increased it to 3 cups of dolamite per box. The fertilizer strip is tomato tone and I assume it is the new mix since I just bought it and the date on the bag is Nov. 09. I used 1 cup on each of the long sides of the box in a little trench 2-3" deep for 2 cups per box. That is all fertilization for box #3 which has the mortgge lifter with the leaves turning yellow. The results of the moisture testing do not show that this box is much different than boxes #2, #4 and #5. All have the Black plastic bag as a moisture barrier with the mix mounded above the rim for run off, so I do not think much rain if any is getting in. I even took black duct tape and taped the slits around the stem so the hole that the plants root ball went through is only about an inch and a half in diameter. So after the moisture testing I do not think it is too much moisture. I also have a Brandywine Sudduths Strain in the same box. It is not growing exceptoinally well either. I am questioning the health of the plants when I bought them. I got them at a nursey I found mentioned on this forum that was about 1 hour away from me. So I took the drive just to see the place. Most of their bussiness is done by mail. If you want to pick up they suggest you order ahead but they also have a walk-in. But the walk in plants are not what they choose from if you order. They did not tell me this but I am assuming from what I saw is that the walk-in plants are left over from when they should have been mailed and that transplanting should have taken place a week or 2 before. They were very tall and sparce on leaves. But all the leaves were green. The cost of the plant was 40% off what I would have paid if I preordered and picked them up vs. walk-in and pick them out. 3 of my plants came from Lowes, 2 Red Beefstake that I 1st planted and an early Girl that I planted last in box #5. They are doing the best. Unfortunately I did not start out to experiment, my goal was to follow your protocole and would be extatic if my reults were half as good. But my lack of being able to have everything you have exactly and not reading the latest carefully has lead to many variables. I will continue to post whether good or bad so others can learn from my mistakes or good luck. Thanks again for your help, if you have any Ideas on the yellow leaves I am all ears. If this plant goes bad I am thinking of buying a large $10 plant at Lowes to replace it. I am thinking either a big boy or celebrity if I can find it. I just do not know of any nursery close that has any better because I am so new to this.

Hey Kimmsr, so, I completed the soil in a jar test, and I was really surprised. Where I thought I had a LOT of OM/compost, turns out there is barely any. I would say it appears to be 1% or less, in a very thin layer floating on the top of the water surface. The rest of the results are harder to tally precisely because the sand and the silt overlap a little at their respective edges, but I can see a general trend. Together, the sand and silt comprise about 70%-75% of the mix. If I had to assign amounts, I'd say it looks like: Clay, 25% Silt 25-30%-ish (depending on overlap with sand) Sand 45-50%-ish (depending on overlap with silt) OM, 1% or less I also did the worm test and was shocked, shocked to find very few worms in the top 12 inches of the soil. I don't know if it's been the freezing weather (last week) or the biblical rainstorms (earlier this week) but I certainly was surprised by the lack of earthworms. The drain test is a little difficult to do right now because we just had a lot of rain, but it appears to be draining faster than 2 hours. So if I'm interpreting these correctly, I am in dire need of more OM, right Kimmsr? I am wondering if the mix that I started (a purchased mix from a reliable local soil company) with was either too light on the OM, or perhaps the OM was not fully composted and the soil food web gobbled it all up? Either way, it sure seems like I need some compost. STAT! And I'm guessing that I WILL need to dig it in rather than just mulch the top. And finally, after reading the PDF you posted earlier, I guess I'm not completely clear on whether to use a fully composted compost---which will provide longer term structure but not much for the soil food web, or a partially composted compost---which will provide more food for the SFW in the short term. help much appreciated! -kmama PS. I guess the issue of whether I need Azomite in this mix is cleared up... there certainly seems to be a rather adequate mineral supply, right? What are your thoughts on Azomite?

If you're going to proceed without a good soil test (and sadly, the home kits don't really count), you should do your homework. I understand your desire to save some money! What do your neighbors say that their soil always needs? What is the conventional wisdom in your area? Where I live, for instance, the soil tends to be generally pretty good, but somewhat on the acidic side. Conventional wisdom (and my grandmother, and all of the other gardeners in the area) say that adding lime will be necessary where I live. In fact, when I don't do this, I get Blossom End Rot (a sign of calcium deficiency) on my tomatoes and peppers, and when I add some lime, it goes away. Does the conventional wisdom of your area say that the soil is always alkaline, and you'll need to lower the pH? If so, products to help you to do this will be available in your area, certainly at a garden store, and quite likely at the "big box" stores like Home Depot (though I might have a bit of trouble finding that stuff where I live, since we have the opposite problem here). If pH-lowering supplies aren't readily available in the local garden stores, I'd have additional doubts about what your home soil test told you. Adding organic matter is always a good step, even without a soil test. As people have said, lots of good organic matter will bring your soil back towards neutral, regardless of where is started, and it will also add lots of the nutrients your plants need to be happy and healthy. I believe it is possible to garden (and even to garden well) without a soil test, but you need to keep on your toes. People gardened for a good long time without access to soil tests, but the other side of that is that the successful folks knew how to read their soil and their plants to detect deficiencies.

Larry, I think maybe you're overthinking this and stressing out unnecessarily, and please understand I'm saying that with a pleasant smile. First of all, I'd do nothing. The more important thing than the actual numbers themselves is the balance between them, so if you did not receive recommendations to fix one thing or another, then that means the balance btween nutrients is considered acceptable by whoever tested your soil. 'Fixing' nutrient imbalances in soil is very tricky. When you start monkeying around trying to change one number or the other, you often fall victim to unintended consequences and mess up the balance between nutrients. It then becomes a very slippery slope where everything you try to do ends up adversely affecting something else. So, sometimes doing nothing, as they basically recommended, really is the best course of action. Secondly, it is almost impossible to easily lower mineral levels even if you needed to...so, why drive yourself crazy trying to do it? You have clay soil and clay is always very high in mineral content, as far as I know. Third, you have fertile soil. Is it too high in some nutrients? Yes. However, your pH is good for most crops and your Cation Exchange Capacity is nice and high, so your plants ought to be able to take up nutrients. I just don't see a problem that you can fix. Adding nitrogen is the standard recommendation with results like yours, and it is the standard recommendation all over this region, including in Texas where I used to live, and here in OK where I live now, when you have clay with a high mineral content. Fourth, it is hard to know if there is anything 'wrong' with your soil or not. I get the impression you might feel you've added too much organic matter and have created your own issues with excess fertility. However, without knowing if a soil test on other soil, say 50 or 100 yards from your garden or on the property next door or whatever, gave similar or vastly different results, we have no context, no background, no basis for comparison. Maybe all the soil around you tests similarly high merely because it is a high-mineral soil. So, without a background for comparison, we don't know if there's any sort of issue or not, do we? I don't see a number for O.M. and that bothers me because I think it is the most important number. If your Organic Matter is in the right range, everything else doesn't really matter as much, especially when you have high fertility. I'd be more worried if you had low fertility or if you had some nutrients that were very high but others that were very low. When everything is high, it really isn't a problem but you surely don't want to keep adding more nutrients because at some point other problems can develop. I am absolutely, positively not a numbers person at all. I don't routinely send in soil tests. I don't test the soil myself. I don't worry about numbers. Instead, I am (as I often say) just an old dirt gardener. I look at my soil and study it and evaluate how it looks and performs. What am I looking for in good soil? ORGANIC MATTER: Having 3% organic matter is perfectly acceptable. Having 5-8% is even better. In our climate, it can be harder than you think to keep OM at 5-8% because 'heat eats compost' causing it to break down very, very quickly. That's why I add OM, as surface mulch, continually and avoid rototilling too much. Every time you rototill, you introduce oxygen into your soil and the oxygen helps make your organic matter decompose more quickly. We rototilled a lot the first couple of years to work the organic matter into our thick, red clay soil, but now I just add it from the top down. Over time, the earthworms and other critters, and rainfall, will carry the surface organic matter down into the soil. STRUCTURE: Good soil is a balance of different types of matter. That's why I always recommend the Jar Test to new gardeners, so they can figure out what they're starting with. If you use a quart jar for the soil test and put 4" of soil into it, after it settles and you can see the different layers, you know about what percentage of your soil is clay, silt, sand and organic matter. In a perfect world, we'd do a jar test and discover we have roughly 45% sand, 25% silt, 25% clay and 5% organic matter. However, few of us start out with that structure, and many of never will achieve it....but knowing the structure we do have helps us understand what we should be adding to our soil. TILTH: Sometimes people think soil structure is the same thing as soil tilth, but it really isn't. When you have good tilth, you can moisten your soil lightly and then take a handful and squeeze it into a ball in your hand. Then, open up your fingers and look at that ball of soil. If you have good soil tilth, it should hold together as a ball in the palm of your hand, but then when you poke it with your finger, it should break apart in your hand. I started out with a ball of clay that didn't break apart at all, but in some portions of the garden now have very good tilth while in other portions our soil still has a long way to go. DRAINAGE: Soil drainage is more important to me than soil fertility. It doesn't matter how rich in organic matter and minerals my soil might be if it drains so slowly that the roots of the plants stay waterlogged and can't take up nutrients. You can have high organic matter and poor drainage and all you've done is create a mucky sort of peat bog where nothing grows because it is starved of oxygen. And that takes us to the next clue I watch..... SMELL. You know what good soil with good organic matter should smell like....it should smell like a nice humusy woodland area. When your soil has that smell, all is right with the world. If it smells earthy, that's good. If your soil smells sour, putrid or offensive, then you know that it likely drains too slowly. SOIL LIFE/BIOLOGICAL ACTIVITY: Healthy soil is not dead and inert. It is alive. You should see little critters like Earthworms living in your soil. If you can stand in your garden (probably NOT on hot day like today) and insert a shovel into the soil and bring up a shovelful of soil, and you find 4 or 5 or 6 or more earthworms in that soil, then you have great soil. If you insert that shovel into the soil and come up with no earthworms, something is wrong. (Right now, though, it is so hot that I think the earthworms likely have retreated deeper into the soil to stay cool.) Earthworms aren't the only life in the soil, but they're the easiest to see and to measure. Healthy soil has all kinds of life forms in it, but many are so small they are not visible to the naked eye. In healthy soil you'll have all kinds of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, nematodes (there are good ones as well as bad ones and some of the good ones help control the bad ones), yeast, algae, germs, protozoas and more. Texas organic gardening guru Howard Garret says in one of his books that one pound of healthy soil contains about nine hundred billion microorganisms. Imagine that! What does all that biological life do there in your soil? Well, those microorganisms play a key role in breaking down organic matter, turning it first into humus and then later into humic acid. From humic acid they break it down into into basic elements, a process known as mineralization. To have healthy microorganisms, your soil needs a constant supply of compost for them to break down and it needs nice moisture, but not excessive dryness or excessive wetness. They also need a steady supply of oxygen, and that's where heavy clay runs into trouble. You often see poor biological life in heavy clay because of the lack of oxygen and also because of the way clay holds excess water. So, with all due respect to soil scientists (I admire their knowledge and ability, but it just isn't my style), I ignore the numbers and look at my soil structure, tilth, biological life, organic matter, drainage and smell. If those things are right, I don't care what kind of numbers a soil test shows, I know I have healthy soil. So look at your soil through my eyes and examine those categories and see if you see any area that's lacking and which needs to be fixed. Most of our 14 acres is woodland and it is sloping woodland because our place is a creek hollow. Of course, we built the house on the high ground that was fallow farm land with almost no trees but lots of pasture grasses consisting mostly of red clay, with some sandy clay in one area, and a narrow band of sandy soil running across another portion (which is where the soil big tree was in that area). All I've been doing since we moved here is basically trying to turn the red clay rangeland into brown, rich, humusy soil like what we have in the woodland areas. It may not be real scientific, but I can see the soil improving every year. As far as your beans, their production relates as much to heat and moisture as to soil, so I'm not convinced your soil has had much to do with your bean issue in recent years. Since your soil wasn't short of P or K and since beans can fix their own nitrogen, the soil might not have had anything to do with the poor bean performance. Finally, I apologize for not giving you the answer you were seeking. You were asking how to make and bake a pie and I essentially told you to make and bake a cake instead. I did try to answer to the best of my ability, but I am not an N-P-K or numbers kind of person. I'm the kind of person who'd look at the soil, smell it, squeeze it and taste it and proclaim it 'almost perfect', knowing perfection is beyond our grasp. I do hope that something I said helps. Hopefully Jay will come along with some answers for you. (Or, maybe he answered while I was typing this book of an answer.) Jay knows a lot about amending soil and he uses the best soil testing lab in the country, so his brain likely works better with numbers than mine does. Dawn