Saturday, March 22, 2014

Soil Test is Back, Time for Final Prep

Sometime in the next three weeks I'll be putting in my final amendments and tilling the soil.  I got my soil test back and things are looking better.  Four years ago my soil was pretty jacked up and out of balance.  Each year that has improved but I still have a little ways to go.  My potassium has been very high for quite some time.  Potassium when to high can make it difficult for the plant to absorb calcium and other nutrients so I've been very careful to keep to a limit the amount of potassium that I add to the soil.  My potassium is still high but almost half of what it was 3 years ago.  That should make a bit of a difference.

Atlantic Giant pumpkin plants are very adaptive to soil types.  They seem to have the ability to get at the nutrients they need so if your soil is like mine and not in perfect balance don't sweat it too much.

I've sent off some questions to the soil testing lab but it looks like my final amendments to the soil will be 7 lbs Azomite, 40 lbs gypsum, 10lbs humic acid and 4 lbs evaporated cane sugar.

The following is a link to a simple but excellent website that lists the NPK for most of the most commonly used amendments:
http://www.lundproduce.com/N-P-K-Value-of-Everything.html

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