sorry it took a bit of time.. very busy weekend ... this is a splendid plant... but i want you to see this pic.. so your head doesnt explode IF it happens ... in MI ... all yellow .. towards white tissue.. can burn off.. in a bad winter.. especially the one after transplant... NEVER FORGET.. life is all in the buds.. and even if it goes nudey .... if the buds stay hard and brown ... it will reflush ... its never going to be a dense pine .... i swear to God i loaded all the BRV pix.. but they arent showing for me right now..maybe tomorrow ... look at the leader growth on a pic of the whole.. looks about 12 inches to me .... so it is a bit less than a standard green dens pine ... side shoot growth looks a bit less at maybe 8 ... this could easily be candle pruned.. to make it fuller .. denser.. and more shapely .... ken

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

Amending planting holes often creates problems with how water moves into and out of the amended hole. After the leaves drop dig the bushes up and look at the condition of the roots and the moisture conditions in the holes. If you see problems - and soils in your area and on your site are at all favorable for acid soil plants needing well aerated soils then re-plant in loosened existing soil, without adding all that other stuff. Or bring in better soil, dump it on top of the ground and re-plant in that, without blending the two different levels together. Do use organic matter on top of the soil, as mulch, but don't put it in the soil around the plants. And if you are applying a 4 inch deep layer keep it away from the stems of the shrubs - ending up with the plants 4 inches deeper than they were before could by itself cause stunting. Skip the sulfur etc. unless you have specific information calling for these on your site, such as that provided by a soil test report - or at least the knowledge that all soils in your area need to be modified in order to get acid soil plants to live.

this has been an odd thread to watch develop. dustin, you gotta settle down. You can garden for years and just barely scratch the surface of knowing what you are doing, and really, all you learn is how to manage the conditions you have. you can know a lot about how to grow...but know very little about how to grow in a new situation, a new set of conditions. The original post is about high levels of certain nutrients. Original Poster later states that these nutrients exist in multiple forms, and not all forms are as available to the plant as others. Then later, laments the fact that he has toxic levels of these nutrients...but no indication of which of multiple forms are present. It's like there are two different people posting. Or that this whole thing is a rabbit hole. Normally, for beginners, my advice is water, weed, keep a journal. Learn. The success of gardening in the first few years is only to a small degree measured by the produce. It's really about the learning, but you don't realize that until later. My advice here is, get a crash course in learning to diagnose plant problems by sight. Ortho problem solver is a good place to start, the big one. Then...despite the lament of too much of whatever...have you tried fertilizer* when your plants have shown signs of distress? Not a lot, just a little, just to see what the response would be? Sounds strange when your soil test says you have a lot...but you can die of thirst in the ocean. Just because you have it does not mean you have proper amounts of the right form...and as long as you don't get a proper soil test, you will never know. *I'm not offering legal advice. Disclaimer not needed, but will be provided anyway. Can't wait to hear the distress that will be created because I recommended a book with ortho in the title. Your complaint about your compost measuring high is kinda like complaining that your mattress is too soft because you have soft sheets. You are stuck on half the story, and you're constantly hitting repeat.