Because I and my children have all had thyroid issues, I was interested in an organic source of iodine for my garden. The first 50 lb bag of kelp meal I bought was quite expensive and the second, several years later, even more so, but after using it on the garden and greenhouse, one of the things I noticed was how much better my veggies taste, especially tomatoes and green beans in the garden and Swiss chard and spinach in the greenhouse. I have also bought fish emulsion in the past. I think I've put on enough marine fertilizer now and I will just go back to using compost. There is an organic supply store in Springdale Arkansas that has all kinds of fertilizers and natural sprays. It's called Nitron industries.

Here is one thing I have observed repeatedly in my orchards: Trees of the same pecan variety growing within 50 yards of each other can have drastically large differences in their levels of nut scab disease due to (1) how healthy the tree is starting the season, and (2) the type of soil they grow in. For instance, once a tree has had a large crop, the following year it may have only a small crop with lots of disease whereas another tree nearby has a large crop with little disease.

Plants are what is in the soil.

Amy, I don't know what products at Lowe's you're referring to, so I cannot comment on them. Different Lowe's stores carry different items and the one closest to me doesn't carry very many organic products.

With reference to the article you linked, I was just shocked to learn there were Amish farmers who were not organic. The ones whose writings I have read in the past were organic and I guess I just assumed all Amish farmers were organic.

There long have been soil, water and forage labs who test for micronutrients and advice farmers and gardeners what they need to do to improve their soil and their crop based on the test results. The lab I'm most familiar with that has done this for decades is based in Texas. So, this article kinda reminded me there is nothing new under the sun.... However, if his consulting firm is able to introduce these old concepts to people who have previously focused only on N-P-K, then more power to them for achieving that.

Until about the last 100 years or so, all gardening was more or less organic, and there was a focus on enriching the soil so it would have all kinds of nutrients in it. It only has been in the modern age that the heavy focus on N-P-K took over the conventional agricultural world, much to the detriment of the soil and, eventually, the food grown in it.

I prefer to feed the soil by enriching it with many different things and then, instead of actually fertilizing plants, I just let the soil feed the plants. Overall, that works fairly well. However, for heavy bearers like tomato plants that produce heavy loads of fruit over a period of several months, I will do a supplemental feeding periodically if needed. When I do that, I tend to use an organic fertilizer from Espoma called Tomato-Tone for tomato plants and then I use their Plant-Tone for everything else. I do not like the newer formulation they've sold for a few years now as much as I liked the older ones, but I use them anyway. Sometimes I just feed the plants with compost tea, manure tea or alfalfa tea.

The land we live on now was once part of a farm. Then, later on, the land was just left fallow and a few cows grazed on it on and off for a decade or more. Our soil was very depleted nutritionally, and mostly it consisted either of a sandy/silty blend that had no organic matter and very few nutrients in it. The first few years, nothing could survive the summer in that soil because it drained too quickly. The other soil was dense, red clay that was highly compacted. You couldn't even break it up with hand tools (we broke lots of tools trying) and even a sturdy, rear-tine tiller struggled just to barely break the surface of the soil. The red clay was rich in some minerals, but had no organic matter whatsoever. In order to turn both of these types of soil into rich, fertile soil, I had to do heavy amending for years and years. For me, it wasn't about just putting N, P and K into the soil---it was about turning depleted, dead, fairly sterile dirt into a rich, healthy soil teeming with nutrients and microbes. To do that, a person has to have some idea of what plants need to grow.

There are a lot of essential elements that plants need in order to grow and produce. Three of them are mostly supplied by the air and water---they are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is more important than most people think. Plant roots don't actually grow in the soil. Technically they grow in the air space between pores of soil. This is when we work hard to turn dense, compacted soil into fluffy soil. It is fluffy partly because of the air space between soil, mineral and organic matter particles. If soil is dense and compacted, plants cannot get as much oxygen as they need to stay healthy.

Then, there's the 3 macronutrients or primary nutrients, that, unfortunately, are focused on almost too much in agriculture nowadays. They are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

The next three most important nutrients are calcium, magnesium and sulfur. We hear people talk about their soil's N-P-K all the time, but when is the last time you heard anyone discuss their soil's calcium, sulfur or magnesium levels?

The remaining nutrients are often referred to as micronutrients or trace elements. They are boron, chlorine, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickle, sodium and zinc. These are only needed in small amounts, but each has a role to play soil health and in the health of plants grown in the soil.

Now, here is where it gets messy---if you add too much of any nutrient, whether it is a primary, secondary or trace nutrient, the excess of that nutrient can prevent any or all of the other nutrients from performing properly. So, I don't try to add a certain amount of cobalt or iron or boron or whatever. I try to add a variety of organic matter and products that will combine with one another to create living, healthy soil with a wide array of all the nutrients needed. If I do that, the microbes that live in the soil will do the rest in concert with the sunshine, water, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The plant roots will take up the nutrients they need, and the plants will be healthy. Healthy plants are happy plants, and happy plants can tolerate a lot of adverse conditions, including extreme heat, extreme drought, many diseases and the annual onslaught of pests.

When we first broke ground, I added a lot of "stuff" to the soil, particularly compost (I even moved my finished and half-finished compost from my pile in Fort Worth here to our new place...there was no way I was leaving my compost pile behind), composted animal manure, mushroom compost, pine bark fines, peat moss (it is acidic and my soil is highly alkaline, so that was a very deliberate choice I made at that time), green sand, lava sand, bone meal, blood meal, kelp, dried molasses, and soft rock phosphate.

The garden started small, and I couldn't even do all the amending needed in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd year. I just had to keep amending the same beds every year, over and over and over. One reason for that is the basic "heat eats compost" concept, which refers to the fact that in hot climates, all the organic matter you add to your soil decomposes very rapidly. Thus, you almost cannot add too much in our climate, and you cannot just amend the soil once and then never do it again because everything you add decomposes and gets used up by the plants. After we'd been here 6-8 years, I felt like I was seeing real progress in the oldest beds, but the newer ones still needed a lot of work. I also was shocked by how quickly everything I added to the beds decomposed. I quickly figured out I had to add vast quantities annually, and so I do.

After about 10 years, all the earliest beds we built finally had turned from red clay to a medium-brown, humusy soil filled with all sorts of life, including microbes needed to help break down the nutrients into components the roots can absorb and use. At that point, I started double digging the beds. Usually I double dig one long raised bed per year. Most of my long raised beds are 4' wide and 35-50' long depending on where they are, so double digging even one of those by hand in order to work more organic matter into the deeper layers of the soil takes me forever.

The doubledug beds are highly productive. Now that voles have become a problem, I hope to double dig 2 or 3 beds per winter, line them with hardware cloth to exclude the voles, and amend that soil. Even if I do it at that rate, it will take me 5-7 years just to do all the raised beds....but eventually I'll get them done. Once they are double dug and lined with hardware cloth, I'll never double dig them or rototill them again. I'll just add all the nutrients to the top of the beds and let rain, digging and planting with a hand trowel, and soil-dwelling critters like earthworms carry the nutrients deeper down into the beds.

The best beds in our garden are the ones we dug and enriched in 1999. Newer beds that weren't dug and enriched until 2003 or 2005 or 2008 are not in as good of a condition, but I'll just keep plugging away, continually improving all of them until they all really and truly have healthy, balanced soil.

When you are growing plants in healthy soil, that doesn't mean your plants will not have pest problems or that they won't have disease issues. My plants have pest and disease issues pop up all the time. The difference, though, is that healthy plants in healthy, well-balanced soil are able to resist or tolerate the damage from diseases and pests and will grow and produce well despite them. So, even though there are times when I think the plants in my garden might look like crap because of disease and pest damage, the bottom line is that they don't die---they keep on growing and producing, and they produce huge harvests, which is why I am always so stressed during harvest time, trying to harvest and preserve everything the garden produces beyond the amount we can eat fresh.

It is pretty common knowledge that you can add nitrogen to your garden beds via compost, composted manure, urea, dried blood or blood meal, and products like cottonseed meal. It is easy to add phosphorus by adding bone meal or rock powders, rock dust, or soft rock phosphate. You can add potash via muriate of potash or greensand.

What is less well known is how in the world a person adds all those micronutrients. Do you go out and buy iron, copper, cobalt or zinc? How? In what form? With most of them, you can add them to the soil just by adding manure (boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese), cottonseed meal (cobalt, iron, zinc), greensand (chlorine, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickle, sodium and zinc), bone meal (boron, sodium), kelp meal (cobalt, sodium). You don't have to add them often and you don't want to add too much. Remember that too much of any one nutrient can interfere in the way all the other elements are taken up and used (or not taken up and used).

I wrote that last paragraph from the viewpoint of a gardener with very alkaline soil. Since it is so alkaline, I never add lime to it. However, gardeners with acidic soil can add garden lime to their soil as it contains magnesium, calcium, and molybdenum.

What do all those nutrients do? Nitrogen is essential for vigorous growth and deep green foliage. Phosphorus is essential for proper root development and flowering. Potassium plays a very important role in your plants' ability to resist or tolerate diseases and also is important in plant hardiness. Calcium contributes to plant vigor and assists in the uptake of other nutrients. Sulfur is important for proper plant color and seed production. Magnesium plays a key role in a plant's production of chlorophyll.

All those trace nutrients that plants need only in small amounts are important in their own way as well. For example, boron is essential for proper flowering and for the proper development of fruit. Chlorine plays an important role in the way that the plants deal with moisture stress as it controls water loss. Cobalt is important for general plant growth and for plant transpiration. Manganese and iron are essential in the production/use of chlorophyll, so plants lacking in them are often off-color. Nickle, molybdenum and zinc play a role in a plant's enzyme system, being key to both the development of plant enzymes and the way the enzymes work. Sodium is important for photosynthesis.

Often, the only clue you have that one of those micronutrients is lacking is that a plant fails in some way---it is off-color, or has poor disease or pest tolerance, or produces foliage but stubbornly refuses to properly produce flowers or fruit. There are some photos online and in books that show the effects of a lack of various micronutrients.

Without soil tests that test your micronutrient levels, it can be hard to know what to add. Our soil was so poor when we moved here, that I resolved to add everything in the beginning. The easiest way since then is to merely compost every bit of organic matter I can and then to return that compost to the soil every year. I don't only compost all the weeds and spent plant parts, but also grass clippings and chopped/shredded autumn leaves.

I can look at any given raised bed in my veggie garden and tell by its production in a give year if that soil remains nutritionally balanced and complete. If the plants in a given area seem to struggle more than other plants nearby, I make a note to myself to give that bed extra soil amendments after the growing season has ended. Your plants will tell you what is wrong with the soil they're growing in if you pay attention and listen to them.

When we moved here, what we had wasn't even soil. It was too depleted of organic matter and soil life to be considered soil. Now, after 15 years of amending, most of it is great soil. It has turned from light brown in the sandy/silty areas to a rich medium brown. In the red clay areas, it has turned from deep, dark red to a light to medium brown with no sign of red until you dig down maybe 8 to 10 to 12". That is how I actually judge the progress made in the garden----not by what it produces, but rather by what the soil looks like.

I am very careful not to do anything to harm the microbes in my soil. I want to have garden beds that are teeming with life. People who farm conventionally using synthetic products tend to have soil void of microorganisms because the products they use tend to kill them. Organic gardeners, by contrast, have soil that is full of all kinds of organisms---both micro and macro. The microorganisms are the microscopic plants and animals that live in healthy soil and play a role in breaking down plant nutrients into a usable form. First they break down the organic matter into humus. Then, they further break it down into humates and then into elements. This entire process is the process of mineralization. The reason you constantly add organic matter to your soil is so mineralization remains an ongoing operation. In order for your microbes to stay alive and functioning, they have to stay busy. Even one single tablespoon of healthy, humus-rich soil can contain up to 50 billion microbes. They include fungi, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, algae, and actinomycetes. All these microbes work hand in hand to ensure your plant roots have lots of good stuff to take up and feed off of. When someone gardens synthetically and doesn't put organic matter back into the soil, it tends to be low in microorganisms because there's nothing for them to live on.

You also have some soil-dwelling macroorganisms like earthworms, snails, slugs, termites, ants, worms, spiders, mites, beetles, grubs and other insect larvae. They help loosen the soil by burrowing or digging their way through it. They are a lot more than the few I mentioned, including sow bugs, pill bugs, springtails, scorpions and centipedes. All of your macroorganisms and microorganisms play a role in good soil health.

So.....when a person who is a new visitor to my garden and asks what I feed the plants to make them grow and produce like that, I never know what to say. I know they want a quick and easy N-P-K type answer, which is the one thing I cannot give them. I try to explain everything I just typed in this post, but few people standing there in a garden in the sun really want to hear that much detail or want to do that much work.....and that is why people rely on N-P-K fertilization. Think of synthetic NPK fertilizers as fast food for plants. Well, I don't want to grow our fruit, veggies, herbs and flowers on a fast food diet, so I feed them the slow food diet rich in many kinds of nutrients---macro and micro, or primary, secondary and trace.

Texas organic gardening guru J. Howard Garrett had a statement in one of his books that I read in the early to mid-2000s that has stuck with me to this day. He said that when you raise your plants with only N-P-K, it is the equivalent of raising your children on a diet of only white bread. I didn't raise my son on a diet of white bread, and I refuse to raise a garden that is fed only N-P-K. For each of us, the statement "you are what you eat" applies. We have to take it even further, though, and understand that when we eat, we are eating whatever our food once ate....whether it was a cow raised on pasture grass or grain, or plants that were raised on synthetic fertilizers or on organic matter full of many kinds of nutrients.

I am passionate about composting everything I can and returning that compost to the soil. For example, a family member will try to throw away a cardboard box and I'll go grab that box and stash it away to use in the garden. At our place, I think of cardboard as "earthworm starter". I can dig in a new area and find few to no earthworms, all I have to do is lay cardboard down on the ground and pile any sort of organic matter on top of it---compost, chopped/shredded leaves, spoiled hay, etc. If I come back in a couple of weeks, there will be a few earthworms underneath that cardboard. If I come back in a few months there will be lots of earthworms and no cardboard (because they gobbled it up). That is the easiest way to improve soil that I've ever found, and it is "no till", too.

Finally, in our early years, when the soil had not yet become highly improved, we had so many disease issues-----fusarium, cotton root rot (which can kill several thousand different kinds of plants, not just cotton), southern blight,......I could go on and on. As the soil got healthier, the diseases pretty much vanished, or at least they stopped killing my plants for the most part. I'll still see the common airborne stuff like powdery mildew or early blight (which also can be soilborne) from time to time, but rarely at a level that kills the plants. I didn't need a soil test to tell me when I finally got the soil to the state where it was just right----the performance of the plants and their health told me all by themselves.

There are products you can buy that contain various microorganisms. The Espoma line of plant foods contains some of the beneficial microbes. However, I put them in my garden just by feeding it lots of compost and other organic matter to eat. If there is stuff there in the soil for the microbes to eat, they will come to your soil and eat it, and they will thrive and reproduce as long as you have stuff there for them to feed upon.

Dawn

Great post Dawn. When you take something out of your garden then you need to give something back. Since we are growing vegetables, we are always removing something.

I have worked hard on my soil also, and most of it is good. Since I have not had a real garden for 2 years now, I have lots of unwanted plants to deal with because something is always going to grow there unless it is totally covered up. I cleared one spot today 4x16. The soil is black and filled with earth worms and I could pull up the unwanted stuff that had roots 8 inches deep. The soil is beautiful and I'm trying to get it ready to 'put to bed' for the winter. I will be adding cardboard and covering it with leaves because anything left uncovered will grow something that I don't want. It's a job.

Dawn, you are a master gardener and so generous with your information. All of us can learn from you. Thanks. Carol

Thanks, Carol.

I agree that we always must put back something into the ground to make up for what we take out of it. I try to put back more than what I took out, which helps compensate for heat eating compost.

Your soil sounds beautiful. Being mostly fallow for a couple of years might have been good for it....you never know. It probably will be raring to go this winter when you start planting. Soil that has rested a couple of years usually is rich and refreshed.

I agree that any soil left bare will grow something in winter. In my garden, that something usually is cool-season weeds like prickly lettuce. Sometimes I let them grow, figuring whatever nutrients they pull up from the subsoil will be great for the compost pile. Sometimes I don't. I try to cover up the soil well in fall, some years with better success than others. Once it starts getting wet and cold (clearly not a problem so far this autumn), I lose my enthusiasm for working outside

We all learn from each other. So much of what I now know and do originated from what I learned from other gardeners here on Garden Web. It is important to pass on that sort of info to others.

When we moved here, I had a vague notion that I would garden organically and that I would work hard to make the soil here better. Those were good goals. Along the way, though, they expanded. At first, it was enough to garden organically. Being surrounded by wildlife in all forms, though, I then added "gardening for the wildlife" to that list of goals. I wanted to be sure I included food for the wild things, and water sources and shelter. Then, the longer I worked away at gardening, the more aware I became of using the most efficient methods---like close spacing to shade the ground, mulching to help retain moisture and also to keep the ground cool, and watering with drip irrigation and soaker hoses to use water more efficiently. So, then, gardening in an efficient, biointensive manner was added the list of goals. As time went on and I began cutting back on the amount of materials "imported" from off our property to use to enrich the soil, I realized it was hard to have a garden that truly was self-sustaining. So, I started growing more cover crops and more compost crops so that I could focus on enriching the soil with material grown right here. Partly because I didn't want to bring in purchased amendments (or freebies) that were contaminated with heavy metals or herbicide residues. That's when "growing in a more sustainable way" made it onto the list. Then, of course, as the years flew by and I watched Mother Nature and how she worked, I found myself endeavoring to work with nature and not against her, which sort of led me to permaculture. Rereading this paragraph calls to mind a phrase from the 1960s or maybe it was the 1970s "what a long strange trip it has been". lol

I knew I'd always have a garden and I knew it would be a great adventure. I don't think I ever could have predicted how much that I would evolve and grow (pun intended) as a gardener. One project or idea led to another and brought me to where I am today. I look forward to seeing how the methods and techniques I use continue to evolve in future years.

Dawn

Great posts I am enjoying all the study time I have been given
kim

Hi Kim! (Waving at you from Marietta.)

Here is another article with food for thought. I found an article that mentioned a mushroom that could mitigate 2-4d soil contamination. If you used Larry's method of building beds, and wanted to use hay or manure you couldn't be sure of, then growing mushrooms on it might be the answer to herbicide contamination. This has a link to a pdf file at the end it talks about king oyster mushrooms for soil remediation. http://radicalmycology.com/publications/videos/mushroom-cultivation-for-remediation/

Here is a link that might be useful: Mycorrhizal fungi

According to Jeff Lowels, author of Teaming with Nutrients certain types of beneficial fungi are created by some tree roots. His book is a dry academic read but goes into wonderful details of these microbe processes. Great shelf book.

Fungi provide nutrients and water to woody plants and woody plants feed sugars to the fungi. It has recently been noted that there is an 'internet' of fungi underground that carry nutrient from tree to tree so that they are able to help each other. A community of trees, so to speak. I think an orchard would benefit greatly from wood chips, especially those where the leaves and twigs are chopped along with the heavier branches.

Understanding the benefits of fungi is becoming more and more important as we come nearer to the end of the available phosphorus for mining. I have read that most farmers use far too much phosphorus and 75 percent of it is lost into the soil and with rain and runoff it moves into waterways and lakes and may create blue-green algae. I am not a scientist, so I don't know if this is true, but is what I have read.

Until the last few years I always wanted to till the soil, but now I just want to improve it from the top and not disturb the ground anymore than I need to. I just want the fungus web to remain and the soil bacteria to keep working.

We live and learn.

Waving back at ya Dawn and everyone from the west of you.
We are getting ready for some cold and so I dug my sweets yesterday and since i lack energy right now I sat down and got a close view of the life of my soil. lots of happy worms but need more compost to break up the clay. maybe tomorrow...
kim