In a discussion of mushroom compost a while back in an azalea group, someone pointed out that this compost is alkaline and not good for acid-loving plants. So please be careful about what you put in your raised beds, if you're going to plant shrubs -- Leafgro is neutral, but manure can be too high in nitrogen unless well aged and mixed with other stuff (better for veggies). Might want to consider starting your own composting area now that you have the room and material for it....

I will say a word about compost. For several years I bought compost at the Ft. Smith landfill. It started out being pretty good stuff, I think at one time they had inmates or people from the Bost center picking out the plastic trash bags. Now the bags are shredded along with the wastes and screened, or blown out. The compost has a lot of shredded plastic in it which gets worse as the compost decays. The plastic blows all over your yard and garden and you spend years trying to get rid of it. The only reason I am saying this is to suggest that you know about the compost before you buy it because it can have chemicals, plastic or about anything else in it. I have used 3 scoops of mushroom compost from Miami so far and am happy with if. If you get compost from a city facility, find out how they process it. You may not want it even if it is free. Larry

Wide is good; deeper never is. The planting hole should never be deeper than the rootball or the soil level of the container but sightly less. Any loosened soil in the base of the hole will settle and the plant/rootball will sink. The top of the rootball should be just above ground level. Afa the soil test is concerned, I see nothing out of the ordinary. N was exactly where it should be (2-10ppm) although it is extremely mobile and can vary widely based on various factors including weather, time of day and time of year; P is a little high and K slightly low but neither are out of line. pH is also OK although significantly lower than one normally sees around these parts. In fact, I'd guess that was what was limiting previous plant growth - good for ericaceous plants......not so good for any nonericaceous plants. The feather meal - like any other organic matter - will have buffered that to some degree. Plant vendors/nurseries are sorely out of date when it comes to planting practices and the 'net is just as full of bad info as it is accurate info.....perhaps even more unless you know where to look or have horticultural training. There is seldom any need to ever amend soils for ornamentals and never a reason to amend individual planting holes. When in doubt, always plant high and backfill only with the removed soil.

Googling found this article which if I paraphrase what they said is: If you apply too much nitrogen the plants won't produce tomatoes till the excess nitrogen leaches out of the soil. I've had this happen before in very good garden soil. The plants grew 12 foot tall but produced a normal amount of tomatoes for a normal sized plant. Also don't remember that they were at all late. My yellow pear plant did produce a lot of tomatoes. The beefsteak production was normal. I've converted my clay lawn to gardening before. I had used peat and sand with some mushroom manure. This time I decided to use only manure for one reason because peat is $90 a cubic yard. So what I did was make the soil look nice by mixing in the MC. I dug in about two inches and then spread some more on top and chopped that in with my spade till the clay clods were broken up. I started this last fall using horse manure in my potato bed. I switched to the MC because my fatigue problem limited me to only getting one cu yard on a one day truck rental. For next years potato/tomatoes my plans are to dig in two inches of horse manure in my lawn, and then pile my leaf cleanups on that area over the winter and dig them in next spring.