The last cabbage in November 2025 weighed 18.75 lbs
I’ve written about this several times over the years but here in the Connecticut River valley amending the soil is crucial. Even though this is the 7th best soil in the world, in this town the soil has been farmed continuously since the 1670’s. The last decades on this farm before we bought it in 1983 were either tobacco or corn, crops that deplete soil badly. And usually all that was added back was N-P-K, macro nutrients.
I started learning about nutrient density from Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association in 2010 when NOFA held its first soil conference.
In 2012 I had found “The Intelligent Gardener” by Steve Solomon and it had a worksheet on how to create the perfect amendment mix for your garden from a Logan Labs test. It didn’t include very many micronutrients so I collected the information from various people like Jerry Brunetti and John Kempf. I sent it off to Steve Solomon and he put out an amended worksheet based on the information. I’ve been using that ever since.
I didn’t have a lot of money to dump into amendments for the first few years. I would buy one 50# bag of an amendment each year. Mostly they would probably last my life time. A few have to be replaced each year, like bloodmeal. And over the years I’ve collected a complete complement of amendments to draw from.
Usually a 50# bag will fit in a 5 gallon bucket. I put the ones I use just a little of in buckets. Or ones like molasses and bloodmeal will go in metal trash cans as there are critters that like those.
The first benefit I found from adding the amendments was when the potato bugs on the plants died after eating the leaves. John Kempf had spoken of this happening on farmers’ farms when they had amended the soil to a level that raised plant health. John Kempf created the soil health pyramid and spoke of it in the 2013 soil conference. He said they’d found dead potato bugs under potato plants that had been grown organically, no pesticides used.
This happened on my potato plants in 2018; 8 years after I’d started amending. That year there were a couple presentations about foliar spraying during the season and the benefits of that. So slowly over the years I put together a foliar spraying program. I continued to use the recipe for foliar I had gotten at that conference, but wasn’t getting the results I hoped for.
So this year I went over the recipe and compared it to the ingredient recommendations. I discovered I’d been using, in some cases, only 1/10 of recommended. So I adjusted the formula and Tom sprayed that all summer until October 1 and the difference was striking!
So for my various gardens, feeding the soil and the plants has made a huge difference.
Here are some of my previous posts on how to take and read a soil test:
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@goldenoakfarm/taking-a-soil-test-december-1-2018-goldenoakfarm
https://steemit.com/gardening/@goldenoakfarm/reading-a-soil-test-part-1
https://steemit.com/gardening/@goldenoakfarm/how-to-read-a-soil-test-part-ii