Balancing Soil Minerals with Steve Solomon

This morning I posted a new video in which Steve Solomon joins me to fix our bad soil:

This is a quick mineralization of what we now know to be terrible, acid, rotten, no-good sand.

Here is my soil test:

Not only are the mineral levels low and the organic matter abysmal, the minerals that are in the soil are hard for plants to access due to the poor exchange capacity. In the video, Steve and I mix up a recipe which will fertilize and mineralize a 100 ft2 garden bed for a season.

The complete recipe we used for my bad sandy soil:

Since I know everyone wants the recipe, here it is:

4 quarts cottonseed meal
1 quart garden lime (better to use 2/3 quart garden lime and 1/3 quart dolomite)
2 cups pelletized gypsum
3.5 cups bonemeal
2/3 cup potassium sulfate
1.5 tbsp borax
2 tbsp manganese sulfate
2 tbsp zinc sulfate
2 tsp copper sulfate
1 quart kelp meal
1/8 tsp sodium molybdate

Here’s what everything looks like spread out and labelled:

Mix thoroughly by pouring from bucket to bucket, then spread as evenly as you can over a one hundred square feet of garden.

In my old garden back in Grenada, I had volcanic clay-loam. Here I have acid sandy grit. I love a challenge!

I can’t even easily get seaweed here, or lots of good biomass. Gonna have to make do. And buy stuff. Right now I have 100lbs of kelp meal on order, plus I’m going to plant some serious cover crops to get my organic matter content higher.

Stay tuned.

You can see the extended interview with Steve here on Unauthorized: https://www.unauthorized.tv/watch/steve-solomon-complete-fertilizer-mixing-interview-unauthorized-73b934/

And you can get Steve’s book The Intelligent Gardener here: https://amzn.to/3jNUvSL

Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health Library: http://www.soilandhealth.org

Compost Your Enemies T-Shirts: https://www.aardvarktees.com/products/compost-your-enemies

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