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.
Related posts:
- Spring Farm Update Aside from the usual spring planting, here are some things...
- Compost sifting Recently i’ve found myself spending an awful lot of time...
- Lawn, right or wrong Recently i mowed the lawn and gathered the cut grass....
- Farm visit On the morning of January 29, we got a visit...
- Chipper/Shredder! For a long time, i’ve been trying to build large...
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.


Leave a Reply