Biochar, sea minerals, magnesium, azomite, livestock manure, organic materials like leaves and grasses, kitchen garbage compost etc are all good soil ammenents. Soil tests are a good idea because they give you an idea of your npk levels. I know It's possible to apply to much of anything so I do everything in moderation. I compost wood chips for my fruit trees. Wood chips are great compost but they are the wrong type for a garden. Soil organisms such as earthworms, Fungi , bacteria etc play a primary role in improving soil so organic materials in the soil need to be high so they have something to feed on. Nitrogen breaks down organic matter such as wood chips but the nitrogen is bound up in the process and unavailable to plants. The point is even when micro and macro nutrients are high it does not mean those nutrients are available unless they are balanced in the correct quantities. I would recommend a good book like " soul of the soil" - by gershuny, acres USA etc.. The original study many years ago on sea minerals bear in mind the entire crop was killed. He applied to much to his corn. The next year he scaled back and had significant yield improvements.

Oldbat2be - thanks for the info. I'll be anxious to see your countertop in! Beausrose - thank you for comments. That tile gets positive comments wherever I take it (and yes, I take it with me shopping). I once had people working in my house (not related to the kitchen work), and one of them said "I hope you picked that blue tile." :) I'd be happy to share the information about it. It's Grazia Essenze in the color Genziana. I added the link below. The tile in the picture is the 13x13cm Neoclassico. It's made in Italy, so beware that it's an unusual size - 13 x 13 cm, which is something close to 5x5". I'm putting 3 of those tiles over the rangetop, on the diagonal, surrounded by straight white tiles, bordered by the 6cm high voluta. Around the kitchen, I will have white tile on the diagonal, with the 3x3 cm blue voluta as an accent. So I'm mixing the voluta and the Neoclassico lines of the Essenze. My problem is that the matching tile in white is in "magnolia" and it's not a bright white. It's more creamy. I really wanted a white tile with the white cabinets and Torquay countertop, but couldn't find one that exact size. So I'm using 6x6 inch Market-Collection Asbury field tile as the background. The sizes aren't exact, but by mixing them straight with the diagonal Grazia accents (and the other way around), I hope it will be okay. I thought it better to have the right color, wrong size, than the wrong color, right size. It looks fine on paper... we'll see. If I have time tomorrow, I'll post the pictures of the sample board of this tile. And get this! When I was pouring over magazines, I found a diagonal accent I liked. I found out who made it, went to a boutique tile store, they located it, and it was ... $195 a tile. I realize some of you reading this might spend that on a tile, but it was over my budget by far. I then found the Grazia - I think the big diagonal tiles are $18 each or something like that. And I love it! Tile is VERY hard for me to pick out (when I did a bathroom, it took me 11 trips to the tile store just to pick a cream tile). But when I found the Grazia, I was done. It's perfect for what I was looking for! So, onto the sink. We went yesterday to see sea salt in person. It is lovely, but was too creamy compared to the Torquay. They had a cashmere there that was lovely with Torquay, but the color didn't match our chip exactly, and our chip didn't match their chip exactly (one was browner, one greyer - they are going to bring this to Kohler's attention), so we were worried about ordering another sink and not being sure of the exact color. Plus it would take 10-12 days to get in. Plus, there is really nothing in my kitchen design that goes with cashmere, even thought it's VERY pretty. It just doesn't add anything to my color scheme. That last is what sold me against cashmere (it IS really pretty though!). So we are going with ... a white Kohler sink (Langlade smart divide). All this, for a white sink. But I think it will be beautiful with the white cabs, white and blue tiles, and Torquay. In addition, it's cheaper, I can get it in 2 days, it's classic and traditional, and it CANNOT be a wrong choice! So white it is! I am hoping it will POP with the other design elements I have. Thanks everyone for your help! I'll post pictures when I find the time! Piglet Here is a link that might be useful: Link to Grazia Essenze Tile

Chi83, I've looked at beautifully roasted, best crop brussels sprouts and thought they looked delicious, but could barely choke half of one down, and nearly brought it back up. I can deal with cauliflower and cabbage if they're raw or cooked right so they don't stink so bad. I have the same reaction to the sulphur in vitamin capsules. The best vitamins I ever had used to mask the smell of the sulphury B's with vanillin, but they wanted to be all natural so stopped that and didn't put in a different mask. Even after I aired out the smell and could swallow them, they came back up. I can eat all kinds of cheeses that stink worse! I just can't tolerate sulphur! Yes, the Canadian law (which I looked up yesterday) mandates iodine for table salt. The salt in canned goods probably doesn't have it. There's such a thing as too much iodine, and the amount of it people got from canned goods would be too variable, I'd think. Every kind of salt crystal has a different finished (serving) shape and, I think, density. You can get grinders that reduce sea salt to the size of regular table salt, but they're generally expensive. Regular salt grinders tend to make small flakes, which taste good, but are actually as big as several grains of regular table salt. That's probably why sea salt tastes saltier. The iodine in salt is bitter, however, and it could be that sensing the bitterness along with the saltiness lessens the perception of saltiness. BTW, The Canadian Salt Company, according to Wikipedia, has been a division of Morton since the 1950's and is the maker of Windsor, Fino and Safe-T-Salt. By their own website, Compass Minerals, the makers of Sifto, are the largest salt producers in North America. It sounds like table salt is a very small part of what they produce. I also learned that the discovery of the original Sifto salt bed started a "salt rush". That sounded interesting, but a quick search on Amazon/Amazon.ca didn't turn up any books on the subject. I have a copy of Salt (the history of salt, not the spy novel) that my father passed along to me awhile back. I suppose I should read that...

This has been an interesting thread to follow, and I would have to say cooking is both an art and a science. In fact, I would say food at its best is a blend of art and science, after being a foods judge at fairs for many years. Leave the salt out of a bread recipe and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt twice, an easy mistake, and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt early and the gluten is harder to develop. Add the salt late in the gluten-development and it's easier to develop and won't require as much kneading. All science! The same goes for adding too much water, flour, sugar (or other sweetener); or flavoring ingredients which can affect the gluten-development in bread when you add too much - like cinnamon and nutmeg when added directly to the dough (this is why we sprinkle cinnamon/sugar on the dough surface for cinnamon rolls, rather than adding large amounts of cinnamon TO the dough. Add too much dairy and you'll end up with loaf with characteristics like - low-volume, poor symmetry, poor cellular structure and texture..... That's pure science. When people have a failed recipe, it's generally not from bad intentions or bad artistic interpretation, it's from bad science. Most modern baked goods are based on a ratio of ingredients. Stick to the common ratio whether you use a scale to weigh each ingredient, cups, pint canning jar, tea/coffee cup or mug... for your measuring tool-of-choice.... So take a moment to marvel at the science. "A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar, 2/3 as much milk as sugar; and about 3 times as much flour as liquid." This ratio works whether you are making one small cake, one large cake, or enough batter for 100 cakes. Alter the ratio, such as trying to make a low-fat or low-sugar cake, or changing the type of flour used, and you will need to alter the known science with different ingredients and/or mixing methods. This science is most important when you develop recipes because you need to keep in mind ingredients that are tenderizers (fat and sugar) and those that are structure builders (flour and eggs), along with the other ingredients. Back to measuring flour for bread. This is one area that is completely without a standard for a scale or a dry measure, as all measurements for flour in a bread recipe are just a "good (or bad) guess". Add to that the way each person fills a cup with flour which will get you completely different amounts of flour if you were to weigh the amount on a scale, and the measuring cups themselves have NO standard in manufacturing. This is one area of baking where experience (art) along with science will help improve your bread. Due to the differences in the amount of gluten and moisture in flour, and those differences vary from brand-to-brand, season to season (moisture high during the rainy season and low during a dry winter) as well as from bag-to-bag of the same brand, you need to develop the "feel" (art) for bread dough. Your hands will "know" more about the dough than an exact measure. This is why you need to hold back 1/2-3/4 cup of flour during kneading. You may not need to add all the flour once it has the correct "feel" - and you may use all of the flour and require even more than the recipe called for..... It is also better to err on the side of a loose/wet dough than a hard/stiff dry dough. But I would also encourage EVERYONE to get a scale. There are lots more uses, along with measuring ingredients (especially if you find a recipe that is all weight measurements). It's the best tool in your kitchen when you MUST weigh something. It's far more accurate to measure 4-ounces of shredded cheese on a scale than it is to try to measure an equivalent in a cup - do you pack it tight/loose???? You can scale (weigh) the amount of batter in two cake pans to make sure you have an equal amount of batter in each of them so you have cake layers that are the same size. I even scale dough for burger and hot dog buns so I can adjust the size wanted/needed and make them consistently that same size, as well as the amount of bread per serving (a serving of bread is considered 1-oz.). When buns/rolls/loaves are the same size, they will bake more evenly. A reason to weigh the amount of salt is because of the size of the grains of different salt products. The finer the grind, the more salt grains there will be in a teaspoon (or whatever measure) because they will pack very closely together, while there will be less total salt when you put coarse-grinds of salt in the teaspoon because there are more voids of air between the larger chunks of salt. But the difference will probably not make a really huge difference in this bread recipe, but it IS a science factor you may want to keep in mind. And plenty of bread has successfully been made with plain old iodized table salt - even though I personally stopped using it many decades ago. So many things are choices, and neither totally right or totally wrong. -Grainlady