How often do you recommend fertilizing?

[slomo]

I was just looking at this product ( BioS.I. ) last week but couldn't find many testimonials and couldn't find a application rate ( Oz / gal water / 1000 sf) . Can you share what your application rate is? My story is very similar to yours and I have about a acre to cover.

I found it to do similar to compost. You can't dig up your entire yard and mix compost in. Anyway it's simple to apply. The app rate is on the bottle. You can call them direct and get the app rate too. Doesn't cost anything.

I applied it ONCE to my yard. That season it turned around like a normal yard. My hard clay soil with basically no root system responded. Put in an irrigation system. Looked for the roots. Not much there in the trenches OMG.

I found it looking for something to bust up clay soil. Turns out we need to feed the beneficial bacteria with sugar a couple times a year to keep them growing and healthy. I never did that. No wonder my concrete lawn struggled all the time.

That old school guy that used ammonia for nitrogen, corn syrup (sugar) to feed the beneficial organisms, dish soap as a surfactant and such. I have his book at home. You put all those items in a hose end sprayer. Jerry Baker was his name.

 

[sgkent]

Bakers solutions did nothing for my plants and lawn. I hired someone who did this stuff for a living then started studying what I could thru University AG white papers. You need to feed the micro-organisms in the soil. Also never let clay completely dry out. The product below is full of humates and humic acid. Those are the compounds that decomposing materials put into the soil that transports the nutrients to the roots. This product is a short cut to building soil. Bacteria simply free up the nutrients. That said, if you haven't done a soil test you stand a good chance of destroying your soil for the rest of your life time if you start guessing what it needs. Especially on clay.

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag) for sale

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag).Derived from Leonardite shale and a natural source of humic substances and trace minerals.

www.groworganic.com

 

[slomo]

Bakers solutions did nothing for my plants and lawn. I hired someone who did this stuff for a living then started studying what I could thru University AG white papers. You need to feed the micro-organisms in the soil. Also never let clay completely dry out. The product below is full of humates and humic acid. Those are the compounds that decomposing materials put into the soil that transports the nutrients to the roots. This product is a short cut to building soil. Bacteria simply free up the nutrients. That said, if you haven't done a soil test you stand a good chance of destroying your soil for the rest of your life time if you start guessing what it needs. Especially on clay.

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag) for sale

Activate 80 Coarse Grade Humate (50 pound bag).Derived from Leonardite shale and a natural source of humic substances and trace minerals.

www.groworganic.com

Guess I love destroying my dead soil. Having to not fertilize for the entire season paid for the Bio SI product.

Sure there are other magic tricks one can do. I use Anderson's Humic DG.

Best thing I've found was rich mix top soil with compost. Every place we spreaded it out completely turned around. We had baseball bat sized okra plant trunks that season. Okra was 10+ feet tall. All the low spots in the yard greened up strongly. Compost for the win.

 

[1 Lucky Texan]

plants get very little permanent mass from the soil. They are made of water and carbon from the air. That's why trees aren't sitting in a hole. But they do need trace elements/coumpounds from the soil, some of which could be depleted from past use/abuse of the land, and some slow-release fertilizer once in a while can help. Certain kinds can also stimulate blooming or w'ever.

 

[bertsmobile1]

For heavy clay soils getting a good biome is difficult
It will take some time
start with gypsum clay breaker
The best way to do this is to apply then run a plug airator over the grass, the type that makes a hole about 1" or so deep then pulls the plug of ground out .
All living organism require food air & water and that includes the micro biome in the soil
Soil if further complicated by the fact that it can be acid or alkaline and that can make the food unavailable to the plants .
After the gypsum, next season apply a sandy top dressing with lots of charcoal dust in the same way
Water that in with a dilute solution of micro nutrients
Following season more gypsum
then the sand & charcoal
As you can see this is a slow process
The grass clippings should provide most of the food for bacteria .
Fine ground cow manure will also help and not be as smelly as chook poo.
And as already metioned never ever let it dry and try not to flood it either .
If the soil is saturated then there is no air
If the soil is dry there is no water

Adding bacteria that need feeding with a sugar solution is not a good idea .
You need bacteria that can live in your lawn without adding unatural supluments and thrive on what is there
Seeding with fresh compost is best and better still if you make it yourself and allow it to rot down to dust which can take a couple of years .
Dilute urine is really good food for grass .
In nature grasses are fed by the urine & poo from the animals that were feasting on them.
Humans got carried away with the chemistry post WWII so we entered the days of seed + chemical fertalizer = food and just about destroyed the soil doing this .
Now we know that soil is alive and keeping it healthy will make healthy plants with minimal need for fertalizers , most of which end up polluting waterways

 

[7394]

milorganite​

 

[slomo]

milorganite​

Is the worst waste of money you can use. Very expensive for just 5% nitrogen only. That is hardly adding anything to the turf for all that cash. No P or K from it either. No micro minerals.... Read the label. Then ask where's the rest??

Using Milo on my lawn costs 2-3 times more than any other out there. Results, can't tell I put down anything. Starter ferts with slow release nitro are much better.

You must have fescue or some shade grass that doesn't need any nitro and such.

 

[sgkent]

start with gypsum clay breaker

that only works on certain sodic (high sodium) clays. But on the clays it does work on, it is the best solution to break up the clay. On non-sodic clays it does nothing but add calcium and sulfur, make the soil slightly more acidic. We are on clay here, almost adobe. I am now a 30 year expert on dealing with it.

That said, the greatest example of what soil biome is, dig a trench in clay to say put an irrigation pipe or cable in. Then back fill. If the soil on top, is not the top soil, you will have a sterile line for 2 - 3 years where nothing grows unless you dress the last inch or so with some kind of top soil. This was clay adobe hard as concrete in summer 30 years ago. Today the soil is black and grows well as long as it is kept covered in summer when it is 110F here. Which it was the other day. I coat with rice hay because it has less seed in it. Without the rice hay the plant roots overheat. This garden was planted essentially 5/1/2022. The soil was too cold before that because this is on the N side of the house.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Yes all the action happens in the top couple of inches because the bacteria need air
Turning the soil as was commonly done decades ago actually kills the soil so the conservation based farmers went to slit plowing & thin ripping
Then the next big advancement was the understanding of fungi which can penetrate hard clay . just so long as it is wet and can stretch for well over a mile around an individual plant .
Thus the advice to use a plug airator which does the least harm to the bacteria & mycorrhizal network .
Despite living in Sydney Australia all my life which actually has predominantly clay soils, clay is something I have rarely had to deal with, as all the places I lived had deep soil over a clay pan so overwatering has always been the biggest problem.
The exception to this was the house in Springwood in the Blue Mountains where all of the top soil had washed down into the valleys so that was a slow process of just adding a lot of compost & heavy mulching with a lot of coarse river sand to make some top soil remembering that as best you can all of the mulch & compost has to be made from local vegetation so it provide habitat for the local biosphere
This is how I got onto charcoal which by & large is the best thing you can add to any soil as it holds both air & water
I make my own compost and my own charcoal .
However do not be fooled by all of the bio-char BS on the web
If you put the same amount of fertilizers on airated soil , pearlite, mica or ground scoria that they put into the "miricle" bio-char the plants would grow almost exactly the same
I find it very dissapointing that every one seems to expect to get overnight results when working with a very complex environment that they do not understand which has taken centuries to evolve .
Thanks for the heads up on gypsum.
It obviously works down here because it is suited to our clays & I had undersood that it was universal

 

[7394]

You must have fescue or some shade grass that doesn't need any nitro and such.

Yes I do have lush Fescue & it works great on mine.