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Soil tests

I mentioned before i was suspicious of some trouble with my roughly finished compost. I did the classic agronomic test: made a number of pots and planted corn. Started 4/7, three weeks ago. Eventually i will pull them up and do quantitative measurement of the biomass grown, but for now i can already do a little qualitative guesswork:

A,B,G: plain topsoil, as a control.
C,D: 50% topsoil, 50% compost.
E,F: 100% compost.
H: Rich, dark results of feeding manure to earthworms.

Some tentative conclusions:

  • It all grows quite well. My topsoil is pretty good.
  • The corn in the 100% compost looks more yellow, less green. It must be that something is lacking, either the compost isn’t sufficiently broken down or it lacks some nutrient(s).
  • The 50-50 blend is doing slightly better than straight topsoil, so the addition of compost is overall a benefit.
  • H looks great. Plants just love pure worm output. :)

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under crops, stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.

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