Larry,
I'm like you. I've mulched heavy the last four years and also had added manure every year till the last 2. My soil tests the last 2 years has been very high in all areas. I can look back at the suggestions they gave me. I have sandy soil in a high alkaline area. So my PH was high unlike yours. The main thing they said was too add sulfur and too not add any manure or use much if any alfalfa for mulch. Although my garden hadn't done bad in the past I did notice a difference this year. It did better. I had 2 different sources run test last year. Both said to use a soil activator. There are several on the market. And use a molasses drench on the plants if the fruiting crops grew too rapidly with light fruit set. I did drench a few times early and haven't lately. I will have tests ran again this fall. Hopefully my PH is down and the other levels are dropping also. I didn't add as many leaves this year. And that is another reason I was trying to use more wheat straw mulch. One of the tests said it would be more helpful in lowering the reading than the alfalfa mulch. I will go over the suggestions when I have time and post if there is anymore I haven't remembered. Jay

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

Thanks, Jay and Dawn

I am sorta shooting from the hip now. I had planned to have a notill garden after this year(for the old garden started 4 years ago). I have planted Buckwheat and summer peas, which I plan on tilling in, and planting Elbon Rye.

Hopefully next spring I can spray, mow or mulch over the Rye and get a crop in some way. I have never done this so I will have to feel my way through.

The garden looks better than ever, and drains well also. I pushed the soil in from the 4 sides and used a lot of organic matter to form a raised bed. I will have to tweek it as I go.

Thanks again to you Guys, and any others that try to keep me straightened out.

Larry

Dawn,
You basically said in a more understandable way what I tried to get across. As I've said before KSU said for me to add sulfur and not to do anything else. Texas soil lab said sulfur and too do Petiole (sap) tests or leaf analysis on a regular basis during the season to determine if anything was needed especially N. I added some supplement to the transplants. Mainly Jobe's. I'm not convinced I needed to add anything. The volunteers without anything have done as well if not better than the transplants. And then I transplanted 2 Manalucie plants late and didn't add anything and they are going gang busters. I think knowing your soil and area are the most important things to learn as a gardener. I know Texas Soil Lab said to drench my soil to lower the salts. KSU said I would see minimal if any improvement because of the high alkaline water in this area. I've talked to irrigated farmers who battle the same problem. I will continue to run tests for a few years but basically will do little except mulch and add manure if needed. Cutting back on manure the last 2 years in the only real change I've made. I do think the molasses and soil inoculants help. I added nothing else to the soil for the rest of the garden. And all have done well. So again we many times worry about things that are really ok. Like Dawn said the best way is too read your soil and also your plants. Between the two they will tell you if you need anything. I hadn't ran a soil test in at least 13 years when I had the one ran 2 years ago. I had went to mulching heavy and was still adding manure and compost. Basically I was doing too much of a good thing. I personally feel if you do little tilling, grow green manure crops and mulch you probably don't need to do anything more most of the time. Jay