Soil Tests From All The Gardens 

Thanks! I want sure how zinterestingthis video was going to be to people, so good to get feedback!

@@REDGardens This is one of the least satisfying videos of yours that I have watched. The reason is that it shows how difficult good studies really are. I was disappointed to find out that the tests on the no dig garden were significantly influenced by a sort of specialized and very fresh layer of compost. Unfortunately it means that the information we can glean is somewhat limited and I imagine you will probably try to perform this study again at some point, with fewer variables. Of course, I REALLY appreciate what you're doing and the care that you are taking is astonishing and humbling. I am continually shocked at how much hard work you are able to put into your numerous gardens and then top it off with the detailed presentation of all this laboriously compiled and analyzed information. I've learned a great deal and skipped a lot of steps and mistakes, though I continue to advance my own fresh new mistakes daily. God bless your soul.

I agree. You get real citizen science from Bruce. I notice that the more we fight our native soils and climate, the harder it is to get good garden production. I have acid sandy subsoil. I have to add compost, vermiculite, and other things to ensure that I get a surviving crop. Otherwise I would only be able to grow blueberries, pine trees, and weed-like crops that grow everywhere (dandelions, etc.). Gardening is a departure from what normally grows in a climate and requires life support in a sense. I bought truckloads of compost and put in onions, garlic, and tree crops like figs and an herb garden. What could I have grown just breaking up the soil and putting in what natively grows here? Probably a much smaller range of crops, but then I would have saved a fortune and the sustainability would have been higher maybe.

Thanks!

Thanks! Glad other stat and data nerds are watching my channel!

Thanks. It is really good to know that my videos are inspiring others. Makes it all worth while!

Thanks! Glad you found it useful! I don't have anything to compare it to, having not tested soil in other gardens I grew in in the past, so the organic matter seems typical to me. I hadn't heard that 5% would be 'huge' - I wonder if that is with conventional field scale operations? I use the standard 15cm, or 6inch depth for the samples.

@@REDGardens Unfortunately in French, this channel is the other half of my inspiration: ru-vid.com/show-UCUaPiJJ2wH9CpuPN4zEB3nAvideos They advocate for living soils, so no dig is their main focus, either for market gardening or large fields. For market gardening , they recommend to start from an arable meadow (can be typically up to 5-7% OM) or, when one start with degraded (tilled) arable soils (which is typically 1-1.5% OM), to proceed with massive fresh organic matter inputs (rcw b.e.). If I remember correctly, ~100 tons of wood chips per ha would increase the OM by 1%. So to reach 15% it'd take a huge amount of wood :-) But still doable on small surfaces, while it's logistically impossible to achieve in large fields where the green manures are more the way to go. So to me 15% is impressive and would probably be explained by the large amount of compost present on the top layer of your beds. I personally observed after a couple of years that biology seems to bring a part of the compost down to the deeper layers of soil (mostly clay for me). The soils gets "darker" over time, specially around the anecic worms holes. It's said that this part of the OM gets mixed with clay to become stable humus-clay complex and that it's the long term fertility stock of the soil (as well as a long term carbon sink). Following your example, I might start some sampling this year and I'll probably try to take a deeper sample (~30-50 cm), see how this "slow-mo" carbon evolves overtime. Thanks again for your inspiring work.

Thanks! That would have been a good idea.

Yay!

You should read the book he menions.

I do use seaweed dust as an amendment in a number of the gardens.

You could find out some interesting issues, but then it is how to amend them.

Thanks! That is interesting, it seems that a lot of people can get excess K, and I am not sure hat to do about that. Looking forward to your video.

Cool. Hope it helps!

RED Gardens me too, we’ve been making/building soil here in Arizona and I need to see if what we are doing is good or bad. 👍🏽👊🏽

Thanks! Glad you appreciate my efforts!

:)

:)

Very good way of putting it, and I agree.

That would be a good video to make. I'll think about how best to do that.

Actually, the apples were added to the Simple Garden, not the No-Dig Garden, and that bed with the apples had the highest pH of all the gardens! So not sure what effect if any the apples had.

Wow, that is low.

@@REDGardens I have no idea what to do ive been throwing humic acids and whatever I can do at it since compost just is not economical and even if i spent the money i would get bunch of bad compost with plastic in it.

Yes, I should have labeled that. Sorry.

@Nobody here but us Chaotic Neutral chickens yeah I think it's only for stuff that grows above ground. You need some kind flood and drain system with clay pebble stuff for potatos and the like and I've never seen decent results but for tomatoes and strawberries I think it's good

That would be interesting to try, perhaps next year!

Ah, you spotted that. Last season I had the full garden covered with ground cover fabric with planting holes for tomatoes etc, and the strips of black plastic buried at the edges was to go under the ground cover fabric to prevent weeds from growing at the edges. It is a bit redundant now and perhaps in the way, but will leave it in place for a season in case I use the ground cover fabric again next year.

I am not sure what that is. I don't think it causes an issue with he plants. Later in the season the plants tend to get a mildew on their leaves which can be really problematic.

@@REDGardens I thought it was mildew too first because the bins they sit in tend to absorb hughe amounts of moisture after a big rainfall. I did film my 90L pots with fresh potting soil because i had it on hand. Next year iam going to plant them in the sand like soil we have here. I hope they will do way better and not die before the harvest. I really love your video's BTW ❤️❤️

Hi John. I am fascinated by the ideas presented by Elaine Ingram, and how they differ from those of Steve Solomon (and others). It could be seen as a chicken or egg type of scenario. Following Elaine you would assume that minerals aren't available until there is biology, and that one biology is enhanced/corrected than growth will be abundant. Following Steve you would assume that the soil biology cannot thrive until there is mineral balance, and once it is balanced the entire soil ecosystem will thrive, as well as the plants, including booting the capacity of that biology to extract additional minerals from the soil particles. At the moment I am biased towards Steves remineralisation approach, thinking if we do the task of adding minerals in an appropriate way, then the biology will follow. It is also something that is accessible, for me at least, and I can use the test results to determine a course of action. And then test again. and keep adjusting and improving things. With Elain's approach, the soil sample, microscope thing is less accessible, and then I haven't really figured out what to do after that. It seems that you need a trained specialist to with lots of equipment and then you need to prepare the biology. Perhaps it is a lot more assessable than I think, and am just ignorant, but an Ingram enthusiast come through the village a number of years ago, and he described in great detail the necessary chain of biology for plants to grow, and then proceeded to examine the soil from a few of my gardens under the microscope, and could not find any of the required biology/species. And yet the samples were taken from within the root zone of very healthy plants. So I kind of lost interest at this point. I know I should not base decisions on one anecdote, but I do find it interesting that despite all of the interest and enthusiasm in Ingram's work I don't know of any growers that are using it and declare a significant benefit. But perhaps I am just not in the right echo-chamber. So for now I have set that aside as an interesting but unproven or inaccessible method. Soil sampling does only measure averages over the area, and will miss sections of different fertility, and it can be expensive to test to many areas. That is definitely a limitation, especially in a space that has quite variable conditions or history.

@@REDGardens thanks Bruce, appreciate the detailed and very informative answer.

would be interesting to find an Irish Grower who has succeeded with the Ingham approach and has managed to identify the soil biology via microscope, and then enhance it by applying a specially created compost to get a greater yield.. that would be the proof!

@@johnsharry9546 That would be very good to find. Even one grower/farmer, and to figure out how accessible it is to others. And to perhaps also find a farmer who has had significant success with the remineralisation approach. And then get them to compare their approaches and results in an open conversation. I would definitely watch that video!

That is interesting. I wonder why he figures 12% is best. Will have to look into that.

@@REDGardens I cant remeber exactly to be honest. I just remember he tried going up to around 15/16 percent but decided around 12 was ideal. It may have been that you dont get anythign extra from goign higher so your just spending more money on compost than you need to. However his context and techniques are different and are for a different purpose. I presume your half adding the compost for no dig so no weeds come up, where as he tarps and flame weeds as you may have well seen. So maybe a different mulch could be an idea now youve reached a good level of organic matter. The only problem i see with using other mulch instead of compost is sowing and germinating seeds seems like it would be more of a pain.

@@joshmann7587 Actually the ideal is whatever is average for your local area. No matter how much OM you add, over time it will go to the percentage of OM in your area. So if you were in the southern US, it will burn off excess OM due to the heat. Bruce is in Ireland so it is no surprise OM is much higher.

@@Da_cat12 where are you getting that info from? Nothing in the growing world is ever the way you describe it to my mind. Not meant to grow tropical fruit in most of northern america yet i see people do that. Saying you cant change your soil in such manners seems ludicrous to my mind. Yes in certain climatic conditions it will be harder but look at deserts for an example, they wernt always deserts.

I dint test last year (too distracted by everything going on in this world!). But plan to this year.

@@REDGardens please post a follow-up video if you do. I like the idea that the remineralized veg tastes better. As an aside, there is a YT video of a discussion between Elaine Ingham and John Kempf, not sure if you’ve seen his stuff but he straddles the biology/chemistry debate. It would be nice to hear Elaine and Steve talk on the subject.

​@@DK6060 I am planning to do another video this season. I have been following the biology/chemestry debate, and there is definite good points with both. To be honest, I find it a lot easier to engage with the chemistry side of things, the biology side seems too opaque to me. I get some of the theory, but implementation is the key.

@@REDGardens I know what you mean, I think that both are important. I built new beds last year, tested them and added the suggested material. Then I went full-on Charles Dowding, but I still plan to test the soil again and see where things stand. I suspect that I will need to add boron and copper again, which I can do with water. I am also adding the amendments to my starting compost to get a regular supply for the soil.

@@DK6060 Sounds like a good plan. On thing that I am cautious about with the Dowding method, is I end up importing a lot of potassium, which might throw out the balance, but I haven't checked in a couple of years. Adding to the compost is I think the best option.

No, I haven't. That lab was mentioned in Steve and Erica's book and was easier to use them.

I have been trying a number of different ways, including digging it in, and adding it to the compost.

The high levels of organic matter of about 8-10% seem to be what is natural in this soil, or that is what the first few tests showed. I am not sure about tying up nutrients, I think it is the other way around, that the plants get the nutrients held within the organic matter over the course of the season as it breaks down, causing a drop in organic matter. Or that is what I suspect is part of what is keeping the OM% from increasing.

I am glad we don't have to deal with gophers!

i sent them to loganlabs.com

If you ask them, they will also email to you the test results in Excel spreadsheet format, in addition to the typical PDF files. It makes it a lots easier to manage the data, rather than manually entering it into a worksheet yourself.

Goffin Land - Living Soil Garden In this case I think it would be calcium carbonate in the soil causing the higher pH, so it wouldn’t be OH- ions but instead the non-dissociative weak base causing the pH to raise.

Жаль, что я не могу перевести это

Because its a good book, give it a read and make your own judgement.

@@joshmann7587 I did. And I've read a thick soil science textbook from 2018. (boring! but complete.) If 100 experts say one thing about soil (or, to use another current topic...say, the coronavirus) and one amateur says a different thing, then I would like a compelling reason to listen to the amateur. (admittedly, the analogy falls apart in that Solomon isn't going to kill me if he's wrong and I do listen to him.) To be honest, I'm just not going to contribute to the destruction of the environment by buying bags of strip-mined crap, shipped via (at worst) container ship and sold in plastic bags, that might not give me more nutritious veg, or even veg with 2% better nutrition. If I can't source amendments close to me, it won't be used in my garden. Skepticism and critical thinking are good--which is why I'm listening to this channel. Religious-like naive belief is bad. A lot of "knowledge" that goes around no-dig/organic gardening has zero evidence to back it up. I'm trying to figure out why our host was convinced by this one book when I was not, particular not after reading the door-stopper textbook. That's all I'm asking. For a compelling reason to believe the one amateur over the scientists.

Good question. It is important to understand why we are following one bit of advice and not others. In this case, there are a couple of reasons. I decided to follow Steve Solomon's gardening recommendation based on his earlier book - Gardening When It Counts - to form the basis of this one garden. To try out his method and see how it worked. When he released hie next book The Intelligent Gardener, I decided to try to use this advice from his book for that one garden, and a couple of other growing spaces, but not for all of them. In the past I have tried to get similar info from other sources, but found Steve's advice and approach much more accessible. I have been planning to explore this area of soil science more but have not had the time recently. I am not sure I would call Steve an amateur, as he is a dedicated practitioner and teacher. He isn't a PhD soil scientist, but has investigated deeply into the topic, basing his advice on the work of soil scientists and agronomists. I feel that I have had good success with my gardens by following this one book, and the crops that grow in the gardens that I remineralise according to his advice are often a lot tastier. The main reason for using this particular advice is because it it s what I have used and understand, and I think provides a useful frame to be able to compare the different gardens. What I do with that information depends on the garden.

@@REDGardens thanks for the answer. It'd be interesting to test the food, using his method vs. not his method. The soil is one thing, but if his promise is "its more nutritious food," then those tests need to be done as well, right?