How to correct P deficiency in cooked soil mix.

bobrown14 said:

Hey there GM thanks for the kind words... been at this organic gardening thing for a pretty long time so most of my knowledge is from experience and trying different things blah blah.

Now that said, there's a very good book I've read that spells out the reason for wood chips and any raw composting material like wood chips, green manure like seaweeds etc.
The book is "Seaweed in agriculture & horticulture" by W A Stephenson whom is the
guy that started Maxicrop. They make Kelp Meal and seaweed extracts in bottled and powder form.

He explains it very well in detail how when adding in something like raw seaweed or wood chips and even straw to some extent will sequester nitrogen in the short term say a month (for straw and kelp/kelp meals).
The way its explained is the micro-organisms use the N in the soil to help break down the raw material input. But after the breakdown there will actually be more N available that was added in with the new raw materials.

Wood chips as you mentioned take a pretty long time to break down. Kelp meal is a much better option as it also holds in water helps with water retention and soil tilth and also has all the macro and micro nutrients a plant needs to grow well ans strive.

This short term N sequestration lasts about a month and is why a lot of folks suggest "cooking" your soil before planting ....and it's what I do. Also I add in some ACT to get the micro-organisms a good head start as well.

My favorite N addition to my compost piles are Comfrey leaves. We have several plants that we cut down to the crown say 6 times a season (zone 6b). That fires up the compost pile and only takes about 2 weeks to break down completely. Can layer Comfrey on top of a potted plant as well to get the same thing as adding wood chips but the Comfrey leaves break down VERY fast in a "mature" soil, a few days is all it takes. Amazing really.

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ohhhhhh shit... yea, now we're talkin man
comfrey is a MUST-HAVE, possibly the best organic nutrient all-in-all.
with my respects to kelp meal..
the c/n ratio of comfrey is it's own lil compost maker, the beauty of it is that because it's so quickly broken down and already in plant form the nutrients are available almost overnight, and when you consider that it's nutrient content is so perfectly well rounded (even the cation ratio is early perfect) it's possibly my favorite nutrient.
Between myself and @Wetdog we probably drive some of these guys nuts with our constant preachin of it's uses.

Your description of the nutrient sequestering/cycling process is important to remember for those making fresh mixes, and when you think about it, that basic concept is the backbone of the microbial interaction to begin with, from the slowest to be available like oyster shell, granite dust, rock phosphates, bone meals, to the fastest like the aforementioned kelp meal and comfrey, the key is to allow the microbes to cycle it.
Not only is uncycled nutrients useless, but as you mentioned they do indeed sequester nitrogen when they are "bio-converted", but it is important to mention that the amount sequestered is reaaaaally minimal, the amount is negligible when you factor in how much nutrients are typically in a soil mix anyways.


For me the biggest difference of any technique or method I've ever used, is easily the process of simply adding whatever nutrients you're wanting into a compost pile along with leaves and grassclippings and allowing the entire thing to compost and mix in with all the worms and the myriad of detritivores to give it the closest possible representation of natures cycle.

IT was a "light-bulb" moment for me yrs ago when it dawned on me to just try and simplify the process. Mimicking nature just seemed almost too easy.

Prior to that I was enamored with compost teas, sprouted seed teas (I still like me a coco water tea), nutrient teas and a myriad of nutrient inputs that were simply superfluous. It's human nature to expect more in return when energy is applied to something, but with plants it's counterintuitive but really over billions of yrs plants have adapted and evolved to only need the normal interaction with the microbial soil web.

The most profound change in the quality and speed of growth was when I started to use my own fresh compost, after that it was so convincing to me and so obvious that I started to really preach the technique to others.

At first I sorta kept it to myself, not wanting others to be able to replicate my success, like a secret ingredient type of thing.
But then I realized that not only is that selfish, but it was actually doing the world a disservice. A compost based grow is much, much more enviro-friendly than a chelated salt grow would be. Especially if you are using biochar
I just really wish I would have realized this decades ago when I started, but I didn't, but I do know this now, and feel compelled to try and spread the word as much as possible

Rasta Roy said:

Your P levels are probably fine, those soil tests aren't worth a shit. They do an ok job a guessing soil pH, that's about it.

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Ph isn't the measure of just how much Calcium is in the soil, but a summation of all positively charged ions present in the soil column put into base percentages/ratios...Calcium and Magnesium are the heaviest of the Cations and shift the ph the most.

So if the test does an 'OK' job measuring ph it does an 'OK' job at giving you base percentages as well..

I think the tests help tremendously

When I had tests coming back at 8-10% Potassium I was seeing majorly different plants than what I'm seeing now at 2-3% Potassium..

Same with Calcium and Sodium and Nitrogen and so on and so forth..

Yeah, the wood chips are just on the top layer, under is cooked soil. This is my first time growing with living organics but the wood chips on top was explained like when u topdress with ewc or do AACTs it allows the micros to break the mulch down instead of robbing nitrogen from the soil. It might not be the most effective mulch to use but kits my first time and it was what I read and went with.. thanks for all the great advice guys I stared this thread a while back and have just gotten a ton of outstanding info..