my personal quest for super soil

Dr. Redhawk.  
I recently found out that a Rural King store was locating near me.  I did some research on their tractors and found they are made by TYM (Korean) and have the same engines that are found in some John Deere (Yanmar).  
Their prices are much lower and from the tractor sites I have been visiting they are well made.  I would suggest looking at them if they are a reasonable distance to your place.

My squash and watermelon seeds seemed to kinda stall after germination, with slow growth for the amount of sunny days and time going by. I really want to have something to eat from my garden this year, so the last three weeks I've given those plants some liquid fish (the hydrolysate kind) and they responded very well. I've always had good results using fish hydrolysate as it's also a biostimulant, feeding the soil microbes I do have. In the last few days I've also broadcast Sea-90, and I sowed what winter squash seeds I had on hand. It's been raining regularly with that tropical storm from the gulf passing over so hopefully those seeds will germinate and be up by weeks end. I also learned something new. Next time I broadcast Sea-90 in my garden that has things growing in it, I need to make sure to go around and shake the plants to knock off any granules that landed on and didn't bounce off the leaves. It rained about 30 minutes after I threw sea-90 everywhere, and the next day I had burned spots on my squash leaves. Look at the little spots on the squash leaf at the bottom of the picture.

I hired my neighbor to lime my farm. Last Friday, approximately 72 tons of lime was delivered and he finished the application this monday. My quest to improve this soil continues....

In my efforts to try and jumpstart this abused and neglected soil on my farm I chose to have some MycorrPlus applied to my farm. It contains sea minerals, bacillus bacterial colony forming units, mycorrhizae fungal spores, and molasses. I hired my neighbor again to spray this over my pastures at a rate of a little more than a quart to an acre is what it ended up being. Each 5 gallon jug was added to 300 gallons of my well water. He did this yesterday afternoon, and today it's been raining, washing this application into the soil. My quest continues.....

Reviewing this thread, I realized I did not share my soil report from 2020. Here it is. The pH has jumped across the board to 6.6 - 6.9. I'm certainly done liming for a while.

Also included is a picture of todays (May 4 '21) delivery of 24.5 tons of Tennessee brown rock phosphate from the source east of me outside of Columbia, TN. I'm super excited to get this rock phosphate applied. It is listed for organic use, has a labeled phosphorous content of 0-22-0 and one bonus to this brown rock phosphate is it's silica content at nearly 23%. Here's a little more about it from the website of the company where it came from for those interested: http://www.calsilcorp.com/tennessee-brown-rock/

I do have plans to apply Sea-90 to the farm this spring or summer as well. I am unsure if I will take a soil analysis later this year or wait til next summer and give the rock phosphate along with rain and soil biology time to work it into the soil and get an analysis then.

I will say that with just raising the pH from a rather acidic low 5's to something just under a neutral pH from when I purchased the farm in 2017 to today in May of '21, I have noticed an improvement in overall grass and forage growth, which I not only attribute to pH adjustment, but also with timely mowings and also the indroduction of managed grazing with my cows.

I bought a pallet of Sea-90 for the farm in my continued efforts to remineralize this soil. I used a tractor I have on loan from a neighbor to broadcast it. Probably no soil test this year as I want these minerals and the rock phosphate noted in the post above to have time to make friends with the soil bacteria and fungal life.

I didn't get around to submitting a soil sample to the lab this year. There were a couple chances amid the drought when the ground got soft enough for a day to take a sample but I didn't get to it. Perhaps next year. I did however get a load of chicken litter delivered and spread on my hay grounds. I've had hay cut three years in a row and I desperately need to give back to the soil. I wanted to spread mushroom compost but no one I know has a manure spreader I could borrow or rent, which is the right tool to spread that damp & clumpy stuff, so I bought a semi truck load of broiler litter and rented a lime spreader to apply it. My neighbor let me borrow his backhoe so I could use the loader on it instead of unhooking the tractor from the lime spreader every time I needed to refill the lime spreader. It was really convenient and I got it done in a day. The backhoe's brakes were broken, but I was able to keep the backhoe from rolling downhill or crashing into anything and needing to change my underwear. I also bought another pallet of Sea-90 but I haven't broadcast it yet. The ground is so dry, I'm leery of adding too much amendment at once, as the soil really just needs water. I'm hoping for decent rain to appear before the year end and get the Sea-90 on the ground too. Hopefully this will continue to nudge the soils here in the right direction.