I just felt bad about kinda “wasting” that much water, so I dug a huge hole in my backyard, dumped all the old soil in there, planted a peach tree in it and mixed up a shitload of new soil. I’m sure if I got the new soil mix tested, the results would be the same, though. It just seems to be a thing with the soil mix (the recipe from that no-till thread on grasscity) that I use.
The peach tree did great for a few years haha. It actually grew so many peaches that it snapped in half by, like, year three.
you know ive got a standalone rain collection barrel that i havent really had much use for in past years, i should set it up this year and use it to flush soil, i think i keep em in like 15-20 gallon totes, and this thing is 55 gallons full so thats about right for the flushing volumes you mentioned.
“ I am wondering if you may have a high Bicarbonate level in that Calcium that is showing really high as well.
You would have to have a AA.82 soil test to see the difference.
Chloramine is pretty high as well as the sodium.
PH is on point though.
You could possibly leech out some of the high salts and chlorine.
By doing a flush with clean water.
These are the filters we have used here in the shop.”
Not much to go on from this, not sure what to do about bicarbonate?
Think the next step would just be to try to flush it a bit after new filter install. Also might try a heartier cover crop like lavender or something.
If you wanna do a flush, maybe use distilled water instead of your RO? I’m thinking that it’d be really difficult to flush in your situation, though, since you’re in that 3x3 bed. Unless you’re cool with a bunch of water spilling out onto the floor and mopping it up.
Shouldn’t the life in the soil eventually kinda stabilize everything? Isn’t that sorta the point with no-till? Maybe you’ll just have to ride out a less-than-ideal grow or two (“less-than-ideal” being relative; those plants you just chopped looked fantastic) and things will all be good in eight or ten months? I’ve read a ton about no-till, but never having practiced it myself, I can’t say one way or the other. But I’ve always thought that the whole point of no-till was that the older your soil got, the better it is.
exactly, but right now it seems im adding something that is building up.
The last 2 cycles I have been aiming to nail my watering with little to no runoff and I managed it pretty damn well, only having runoff maybe 1 or 2 times in each cycle.
I am now thinking that might be a bad move and start watering more at a time to get runoff more often. I’m going to change my filter, not using RO been using this… https://www.lowes.com/pd/A-O-Smith-Clean-Water-Filter-Dual-Stage-Carbon-Block-Under-Sink-Water-Filtration-System/1000562057
I got it because it had both chlorine and chloramine checked on the side of the box.
so looking into other options at the moment.
I was literally just googling about what to do with too much bicarbonate in the soil and more than one product containing solution grade gypsum was recommended. Glad to see it’s not just people trying to sell snake oil-type products.
I found that blog post from soil doctor too…read it and kept moving because it was a lot of extraneous words that boil down to, “I’m not giving away real info for free.”
More communiqué
“(bicarbonate)Usually it is what cases hard water deposits coming from your water source.
It looks like good calcium with a standard soil test.
Which is why we recommend the aa.82 test.”
Got the test done at my local organic supply shop @HorseBadorites.
It will prob be good enough for my EWC etc but think ill go thru Logan from now on for the actual bed testing.
This is really interesting stuff, I’m on a well and know I have hard water but I had heard at one point that the mineral content would actually be good for the plants health, this might explain the high sodium levels in my soil test. I have some gypsum on hand are you guys saying that just mixing some of that into the soil will help remediate the sodium or does it need to be mixed with water or how would I go about that?