Looking for live soil recipes. Organic please help!!!
so I am no expert by any means, but I've been lurking around these organic threads for a bit. someone like
@Richard Drysift is a lot more knowledgeable and can hopefully lend a hand.
here's what I just mixed up as a fresh 2.5 cu ft batch of soil a couple months ago. I'm not super accurate with anything, more so rough judgement of mixing a little more of this or less of that.
1/3 peat
1/3 compost (mix or some bu blend I found at a local shop and homemade compost)
1/3 pumice (definitely went more than a third of mix here)
I watered and mixed the peat and aeration first to a good moisture level, then added the compost and mixed everything again. after that came the ammendments.
each of these are total additions to the mix for roughly 17 gallons of soil in the end.
15 large hand shovels full of fresh ewc
3/4 cup alfalfa meal
3/4 cup neem meal
3/4 crab meal
1.5 cups kelp meal
1/2 cup insect frass
1 tsp humid acid
2 cups oyster shell
4 cups basalt rock dust
1 cup gypsum
1.5 cups st George black rock dust
a lot of that is probably unnecessary and can be done a lot simpler. main things being quality compost and proper aeration. after that just need to buffer somehow and use some dry ammendments, tons of choices to either buy in individual packages or a pre mixed box with essentially all the same things. I just bought all my things separately, so cant really help you on the pre mixed options, but some of them seem great.
one last thing I would recommend researching is a worm bin. at first it seemed strange to set up a worm bin, mine is in my closet, but I think that is what has made my learning curve for organic soil so easy (that and reading through a lot of this section, tons of good info out there in the threads). I always have fresh microbes to top dress whenever I want and have really not come across to many issues I could attribute to the soil. my main issue is making sure to keep soil at a proper moisture. when that's all good, plants always seem to thrive.
hope some of this helps, but I'm sure some more will chime in and hopefully get you squared away.