So even though this thread is about soil recycling, I figured I would show the process of soil building from scratch. I find "recycling" to be a silly term anyway, reamending makes more sense...regardless, the "recycling" process is simply adding amendments to a soil base - which also happens to be the second part of building a soil from scratch, so it all applies. Hope that makes sense.
Building a soil from scratch is much cheaper and much more rewarding than buying premixed soil. Also the quality is incomparable.
First off, we have to decide on a soil mix. There are countless mixes out there all claiming to be better than the next one...I prefer to go with a mix that I know is tried and true by a wise old coot. The mix is as follows
Base mix:
1/3
high quality EWC or compost (the quality of this humus source cannot be stressed enough. this is by far the most important aspect of the soil. use poor humus and this will be a nightmare)
1/3 sphagnum peat
1/3 aeration (pumice, rice hulls, lava rock, etc.)
Per cuft of base:
4-5 cups rock dust mix (4x glacial, 1x bentonite, 1x powdered oyster shell, 1x basalt dust) AFAIK the glacial and basalt are relatively interchangeable ..just use whatever is local (this goes for just about anything in ROLS...local is often best).
1/2 cup neem meal and/or karanja meal
1/2 cup crab shell meal
1/2 cup kelp meal
Thats it...
if you want to get fancy with it you can add a few other things such as:
Gypsum: I use 1/2cup per cuft...calcium and sulfur. good to add if you don't have the highest quality EWC.
Biochar: up to 10% of the mix, remember to "activate" it first by soaking in EWC/fish hydrolysate or something for the carbon to absorb so it doesn't rob your soil of nutrients. I use about 1/2 cup per cuft, but could easily double that amount.
Alfalfa meal: in the mix pictured I used 2 cups alfalfa meal for a 10cuft batch...you can use more if you want. it is very "hot", so be careful.
Fish meal: I had some leftover so I threw the last cup worth into the 10cuft batch
A note on humus: If you can't find any local worm farmers with castings, or folks with good compost, look for Bu's Blend Biodynamic by Malibu Compost. It is one of the best bagged products you will find, and has a great reputation with real gardeners. Bu's blend is what I used for this last batch...I would've used EWC but my local worm guy is out at the moment, and my bins are a month of two from being harvested
A note on sphagnum: peat comes in compressed bricks that are usually around 3 cuft. once you open and expand the bricks they are around 5 cuft of material, so keep that in mind when measuring. Also, often times the peat is very dry and tends to have hydrophobic tendencies. This can make saturating your soil a pain. To combat this, you should rehydrate the peat
before mixing it with the other components. Once it is moist (not wet), you can proceed like normal.
Here we go:
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Step 1: Humus + (hydrated) Peat + Aeration
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Step 2: Mix thoroughly with hands and bare feet while humming a tune....
Now its time to add amendments. From this point on its basically the "recycling" process, although you wouldn't want to add nearly as many amendments during a "recycle". The soil you would be "recycling" would already contain many nutrients, whereas the current base mix we have just prepared only contains a small percentage of compost, and the rest is inert. Big difference in the amount of input needed to make a balanced soil. Anyways.....
Step 3: The rock dusts
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Step 4: The meals
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Step 5: Repeat Step 2..but more vigorously, and for a greater length of time, and humming a more intense tune. This is what you should end up with:
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Fill up smartpots or garbage bins, water with an ACT or .25% molasses dilution in water, let sit for 4+ weeks. At that point you are ready to fill your no-till pots and start reaping the rewards! Or if you are a boss you can fill your no-till pots from the get-go, water them, throw some worms in the mix, and then let sit for 4 weeks and plant..that will give the soil a head start to develop microbe populations, fungal networks, etc.
To show some results, at exactly 4 weeks I filled a 30 gallon smartpot with the pictured soil mix, and transplanted these ladies into it. They were a bit unhappy in their old pots (they had been living in roots 707 that i topdressed a bit to heavily with neem, crab, and kelp) and it is obvious from the pics that they are much happier now in their no-till home. These are 2 days apart, first one taken immediately after transplant.
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Lets see how many cycles I can get out of this baby...