Doug McEvers

John,

Start a thread," understanding your soil" or something like it. You have a good soil knowledge, I am home schooled on soil but learning quickly on the job. I was fortunate many years ago to discover Acres USA. Went to a couple of their annual conferences and found out there is a mainstream agriculture counterculture. Most all of what Charles Walters and Acres USA published and taught came from the great minds like Professor William Albrecht. His early soil testing and reports were taken from Malabar Farm in Ohio, a pioneer in soil rebuilding. I suppose his research would have been somewhat different if not for Malabar farm and its living soil, brought back to life with grasses, livestock and diversity of crops. The soils were badly damaged when Louis Bromfield started Malabar but were brought back to a highly productive state with good farming practices. Professor Albrecht was able to establish good nutrient percentage guidelines using Malabar farm soils for reference.

We can restore our soil, understanding where you are currently is where it starts. Life in the soil is ultra complex and we will never know all there is to know. But we know what works generally. covers, limited disturbance, a move toward soil balance. This gets life in the soil going and the unpaid workers go to work.

From the book, Eco-Farm   My guide to understanding soils for the last 35 years. This is somewhat condensed for brevity, but the point is made for balanced fertility.

"Calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium, all four are strongly alkaline in character. The acid condition of the soil means very little if not related to the availability or absence of these major cation nutrients. In fact we will not deal with pH as such. By bringing calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium into equilibrium, we will automatically adjust soil pH in a soil system suitable for plant growth. In the meantime, pH provides a clue, albeit one that can be easily misread if fundamentals of soil balance are not kept in mind".

Amy,

I think you need to consider your subsoil as part of your water management/soil productivity. I remember reading about the growing of ancestral corn in dry areas, they would plant it in a trench, closer to the subsoil moisture. If I remember right, they would fill in the trench somewhat putting the roots deep into the soil. Your subsoil can be a help or a hindrance in retaining moisture and fertility elements. Our farm is sub irrigated here because we are on the higher base of Glacial Lake Agassiz, the Red River of the North is to our west. We also have Stony Creek flowing through our farm so this is our local drainage low point. In talking with our soil contact at Cornell Soil Lab, she looked at the USGS Soil Map for our area to further understand our underlying soil. She said we have about a 5 foot layer of semipermeable subsoil that will hold moisture but will also drain to points lower. We have been much above normal for rainfall here the last 2 growing seasons so plans for planting of crops followed by cover crops have not happened. We planted the crops, the grain quality was high but yields were off due to too much moisture. I need to develop a hydrologic interface to what we are doing here, planting crops that will do best with the moisture conditions in the topsoil and subsoil in that given year. Our 3 main tillable fields all handle subsurface water somewhat differently.

Gary Zimmer says pH levels can move one to two points during the growing season, the plant roots adjusting the soil to their needs. Magical when you think about it but so are all things growing.

Amy,

I like your all things considered approach to soil improvement. My organic farming journey is in its infancy, but my organic gardening (7 years) has been my proving ground for what we are doing on a larger scale. Adding and managing organic matter would be my first priority. As your soil organic matter (SOM) improves, I think your soils will start working biologically and your pH will head closer to the neutral point (7). This is what I believe we are seeing here. Our management practices of minimum and shallow tillage along with soil friendly amendments are showing up as lower pH and high phosphorus availability. I have never considered high soil pH as a detriment, it is a sign in our case of a high inherent soil quality. Our soils are high in calcium, magnesium and potassium, thus the high pH. Modern farming practices have done nothing to improve SOM and soil biological activity. Far better to have high pH to work with than an acidic soil. A small scale is much easier to work with than a larger scale as you can actually amend a garden size area to get things in balance. Not so on a farm scale, soil short of the macronutrients cannot be improved affordably. The renowned agronomist, Donald L. Schriefer, says you can't even bring up some of the trace elements like iron and manganese affordably. Better to add them in row to provide balance in the root zone. Microbial activity is the key to soil health and improvement, feed the microbes (cover crops and the like) and good things will follow. Soil hardness is also a very important factor in soil biological activity, soil needs oxygen, compacted soil does not allow it. Residue management is the number 1 priority (managing soil air)) for Donald Schriefer, you must have a conduit from the soil to the atmosphere to allow the exchange.

Your calcium to magnesium ratio is about 8 to 1, the standard ideal is about 6 to 1 (Albrecht Method), so I would not consider magnesium high. Certain soils do not test accurately with some testing methods I have found. Might be long standing soil labs with good credentials but my higher pH soil did not test at all accurately, so I switched soil labs. Plant tissue tests are far more valuable in finding out what your soil has to offer or does not. Every renowned soil consultant says to test plant tissue to find out what is in the plant and available from your soil. We have a Sweet 16 apple tree here that I feel got some chemical drift a few years ago. It had regular leaves and some smaller leaves and not many blossoms or apples. I have been giving it plenty of water in dry years so I think I can rule water out. What I did was a balanced fertilization including chicken pellets, gypsum, a mix of what I call soil life starter fertilizer and Soil Biological. This past summer the Sweet 16 had a very nice crop of large apples, enough for friends, family and the local food pantry. My TLC appears to have brought the tree back to a productive state, I think. No more chemicals on this farm so these mysterious tree maladies are over, I hope.

Not a soil expert but your Ca to Mg ratio might suggest some dolomite limestone to raise somewhat your soil pH and bring the ratio closer to the ideal.

I know nothing of roses except the climbing roses we planted many years ago here in western MN are still very robust. They tolerate our cold climate and have been very prolific the last 2 years with much above normal rainfall. Got them from Bachmans in MSP. They bloom for a long time and have had very little care except cutting out the dead material. Built a cedar trellis for them when starting out, still stands strong today. For flowers on this farm, it is survival of the fittest, high maintenance does not cut it.

In my mind, hollyhock is a 2-year plant here, may be wrong about this. I see many smaller plants showing up amidst the blooming plants in July and August. I was assuming these small hollyhocks will become next year's blooming plants, wonder how to prove this? Also, maybe our hollyhocks here would grow from seed and bloom the same year in a warmer climate? We are in western Minnesota, so soils generally do not start warming until May. Some hollyhock science is needed. For hollyhock bed management I never harvest all of the seed and will wait until seeds start shattering before collecting the stalks and seedheads. I believe in local source seed being used for restoration projects and will not send native prairie seed more than 200 or so miles from here. I have no similar restrictions on ornamentals as long as they are not considered invasive.

Judith,

I have no pictures, but they are big and colorful. They require no care and self-seed each year, my recent fertilization has caused them to expand. Might be my claim to fame, world's largest hollyhock patch. I would call them old fashioned hollyhocks, dating back to the start of this farm (1880) possibly. I would imagine my great grandfather (Chris) was more interested in farming than flowers early on but after he married great grandmother (Marie) I bet the flowers came soon after. I have a gallon bag of seed from 2024 and have yet to thresh out the 2025 crop. Would be happy to send them out to anyone interested here. We can't have too many flowers !!

We have hollyhocks here on our farm, have been in the same spot for years. Ours seem to be a 2 year plant, smaller plants show up in mid to late summer and that I believe are next year's flowering hollyhocks. They are tough as I have burned the bed in spring the last couple of years to slow down grasses and clean up leaves. Hollyhocks come on strong even if they got singed a bit. The site where they grow is about the hardest, dryest soil on our farm. I have watered them on dry years and the water, 300 gallons at a time just vanishes. Our hollyhocks have been in the family for as long as anyone can remember.  All of my great aunts had flower gardens, some with white picket fences and of course many hollyhocks. I save the seed from ours in the fall and have been giving them to friends and family. They do like balanced fertilization I have found; some were about 7' tall this year. We have 4 or so main colors, white, a deep red, many shades of pink and one that is kind of a light lavender, this is my favorite. I cut the stalks in the fall with the seed heads and then store overwinter in a 36 gallon garbage container. I have a seed debearder for native grass seed and run the hollyhocks through to thresh out the seeds. Long live the hollyhock !!

This is also a good product, have used it for years on our garden. Quite affordable, 1 gallon will treat a lot of territory. Found out about it years ago at an Acres USA Conference. I was in the exhibition area and asked a farmer there did he use any of the products on display. He said yes, Natur's Way Soil Biological, had been using it for years. His brother farming right across the road did not use it, he said the difference in soil hardness and tilth was very noticeable between the treated and untreated farm.

https://naturs-way.com/soil.htm