Salt in the soil.

At some point, someone who didn’t know any better broadcasted some minerals around the soil of one of the garden areas. There is a trash can containing the minerals left down there. After noticing unusual growing characteristics (a general lack of growth, and chlorosis in some plants) of some plants in that area, I had a terrible thought which made my heart sink into my stomach. I went over to the trash can, opened it, and gave the minerals a taste. Salt. They used livestock minerals on the garden. After getting over my initial feelings of sadness, anger, confusion and -face palm-, my mind started getting to work. I don’t know how much of that area was salted, nor to what degree. The fruit trees seem to be growing well, but they’re on the upper half of the area and not where the veggies are grown. My first thought was just to fill the areas where veggies don’t grow well with salt-tolerant trees, like locusts, the local alders, hawthorns, etc. The majority of the veggies which we’d like to put down there could use the extra shade during the summer anyway. That’s assuming there are spots without much salt in there somewhere. And I still have no way of knowing where the salt is and is not, and where it is in the highest concentration. I’ve thought of flooding the place somehow, but we really don’t have enough water for that, plus the feet of heavy clay soil can make that difficult, as far as I know.
Does anyone have information or tips on how to deal with this? Is there some magic solution? Am I best off with the salt-tolerant trees? It’s my understanding that they’ll eventually take up at least some of the sodium, but I don’t know to what degree or how long it would take to make a difference.
My cabbages are suffering!

Oye! Salt.

So, there is a list out there somewhere of the salt tolerance level of different veggies. Watering it out is the best thing you can do, which means: water while it's drizzling and after it rains if you are in a dry climate (so it sounds). BUT, you can also grow tamarix, which accumulates salt in it's leaves: then dispose of the leaf drop and eventually the plant. They can go weedy. You might be able to grow pickle-weed (the dispose of the salt-filled biomass). Sometimes cattails are also tolerant. Depends on your moisture levels. Those two like extra moisture. tamarix does too, but can stand quite dry. Also: consider what is grown close to the ocean: aloe vera, nopales, asperagus, citrus, and strawberries. If you do cover it, and then the soil dries, those plants will have their roots down in the ground and be sucking from that salt area in any fill that's less than like a foot deep - and even still- perennials will reach deeper! I think I remember barely being very salt tolerant too. If the area is not naturally salty and just contaminated, then in time it will return to normal. Adding organic matter will help with bulk, general plant health, drainage, and holding moisture so the plants don't dry out. when it gets dry, they suffer more.

I hope that helps!

Salt: You should be okay with beets and their relatives. Most domesticated beets and chard were derived from "sea beet", Beta maritima, which was very coastal and tolerant of higher than average salt concentrations.

Oh my gosh you two, thank you so much.
It's nice seeing the options you talked about and I'm going to look up salt tolerant veggies later today and change my plans for that area. I still might turn it into a tree zone though, it seems like a nice idea now that I'm used to it.

Electrical Conductivity is a very quick, simple and inexpensive method that farmers and home gardeners can use to check the health of their soils. You should be able to use a EC to get a handle on where the salt is.



Deep Tilling or deep double digging in a garden. Maybe yeomans plow.
For soils with high salt levels, deep tilling can help by improving drainage. This method works by breaking up hard soils, such as compacted clay, known as claypans, or rocklike soil layers, known as hardpans, that prevent the downward flow of water. Deep-tilling the soil helps to improve downward water flow but is usually only temporary, as some parts of the soil may harden and reseal.

Flushing Soil and Preventing Evaporation
Flushing the soil is the process of using a low-salt water to irrigate the area and wash the salt below the root zone; however, this process works only with soils that have good drainage. A soil test can help you determine how much water to use; the soil should be tested again to make sure the process worked. When water evaporates on a dry soil surface, it leaves salt behind. To help prevent evaporation, you can add a layer of mulch to help soil retain moisture.

Chemical Remediation
Amending salty soils with sulfur, lime or calcium can help by removing or replacing the sodium in the soil. A soil test is needed to determine how much calcium, sulfur or lime to add. Sulfur amendments are used for soils that have free calcium carbonates. Several factors determine how the amendments are applied, including the area's groundwater, specific soil condition and geological factors.

Combination of Methods
A combination approach is more effective at dispersing enough salt from the surface to sustain plant growth. Start treating the surface first by applying the correct amendment and working it in, using deep tilling. Then flush the soil with water to leach the salt from the surface, which means adding enough water to move the salt through the soil. Use the soil test results to determine how much water to use. Repeat this process, and test the soil periodically to measure progress.

In the "Greening the Desert" video, Geoff Lawton speaks about how fungal activity encapsulated the salts in the soil and made the inert. Check it out. Lots of ramial mulch will speed the process.

[quote=Jd Gonzalez]In the "Greening the Desert" video, Geoff Lawton speaks about how fungal activity encapsulated the salts in the soil and made the inert. Check it out. Lots of ramial mulch will speed the process. [/quote]

I immediately thought of that video. Fungi do all sorts of wonderful things in your soil, tying up salt being just one of them. If you can pile on the high-carbon mulch (wood chips), you'll give the fungi an environment to establish their network. The fungi will also open up pathways in the soil so that water will flush the salt down into a deeper profile where it will not adversely impact shallow rooted annuals and herbaceous plants. There is a kind of natural selection that takes place --- fungi and microbes that do well in such an environment will thrive.

There are a number of trees that tolerate salty soils -- basically anything that naturally grows close to the ocean, but also popular landscaping trees like Crepe Myrtle and Sweet Gum. Thornless Honeylocust does very well in high salt soils and I believe that it's a nitrogen fixer (although some have debated that, as the roots don't fix nodules). Just Google "Salt tolerant trees" and you'll find all sorts of lists out there on the interwebs.

If the salt is still mostly on the soil surface, you could always scrape the top 3 inches or so and haul it away. That would be sad and a ton of work, but with heavy mulch and compost, you could rebuild that top soil within 2 years. HEAVY mulch -- wood chips, etc. I'd rather deal with the problem once and be done with it, than to watch your poor cabbages die year after year.

If you can't remediate the salt and grow food crops there, then you could plant trees like the ones I list above and at least recover fire wood or lumber from that space.

If you use the conductivity to find the salt levels, removing the surface soil in high salt areas would not be a big issue.
You can then take this soil and build a leach pit. You likely could use gray water to leach with.
If you had to recycle the water you could sand filter and then run through a ion-exchange resin or ion-exchange polymer to absorb the sodium.
Or you could just use sun to vapor recycle water. One person I know developed a ice system to concentrate salts out of water.

A few article screenshots about the role of mycellium in Chloride negative ionic uptake in plants. I'm not a biochemist, but it seems like binding the chloride in plant material makes the saline soil inert.

Everyone has given you some good advice.

It seems to me the best thing to do is to get a soil test of the suspected area.

There may have been something going on that the previous owners were trying to fix with the stuff in the trash can.  

There are other things that taste salty that are good for the soil.  Magnesium is one.   If I am not mistaken, fertilizer taste salty.
I am not recommending using the stuff in the trash can, just trying to point out it might not be what you think it is.

I believe in everything in moderation. I put salt in my garden, not just any salt, but specifically Sea-90, and a measured amount only applied once a year. Not all salt is created equal. For example, when seawater is evaporated, the first compound to come out of suspension and crystalize is sodium chloride, or table salt, and that can be removed by itself leaving behind nearly all the other minerals in the seawater. Seawater can also be left to completely evaporate, and the remaining salt will contain all the other minerals present in the original seawater. It's all these other minerals that really benefit a soil and the soil microbial life. So one may ask "what about all that salt that's being added to the soil?". Well, a lot of that can rinse right on thru a soil with rain or irrigation. Some of that sodium will bond to cation exchange sites on soil particles, but sodium has the weakest bond of all the cations, and can easily be displaced to become mobile and rinse out with water.

The right kind of sea salt can really benefit a soil. I noticed in OP's original post that someone had used livestock mineral in the garden, so there's no telling what went awry there, including how much was applied to the soil, and I'm not entirely surprised that a salt manufactured for livestock may yield undesirable results in the garden, as there are many man-made livestock minerals out there.

Are Livestock Minerals bad for garden soil?  I thought minerals were good for the soil.  Just something to think about.

"The cheapest filler used in most range minerals is CALCIUM.  Calcium is cheaper than salt.  Why is all that calcium in your typical range mineral?"

"Look at a mineral tag that is 16% calcium and 8% phosphorus."

"Salt usually gets the rap for being the cheap filler. But because sodium is always deficient in forages, salt cannot be a filler because the sodium is needed."

http://www.cattlemineral.com/just-say-no-to-cheap-fillers-in-range-minerals/

Supercharge your soil with Minerals

https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/supercharge-your-soil-with-minerals-zbcz1411

I still this this calls for a soil test.

James Freyr wrote: the first compound to come out of suspension and crystalize is sodium chloride, or table salt, and that can be removed by itself leaving behind nearly all the other minerals in the seawater. Seawater can also be left to completely evaporate, and the remaining salt will contain all the other minerals present in the original seawater. It's all these other minerals that really benefit a soil and the soil microbial life.

I had that exact question in my mind. Thanks for the answer. I did a test batch of evaporating seawater. At some point i had a lot of salt in the water. It seemed to me  that "scooping" the salt out of the water would be better than "scraping" the salt out after fully dried. This would leave a mineral rich water that i could dilute and apply on my trees.

I have access to seawater once a month and bring back a few gallons each time.  I have plans to build a solar dehydrator and use it to evaporate it.

wayne fajkus wrote:
I had that exact question in my mind. Thanks for the answer. I did a test batch of evaporating seawater. At some point i had a lot of salt in the water. It seemed to me  that "scooping" the salt out of the water would be better than "scraping" the salt out after fully dried. This would leave a mineral rich water that i could dilute and apply on my trees.

I have access to seawater once a month and bring back a few gallons each time.  I have plans to build a solar dehydrator and use it to evaporate it.

Yes! If you're evaporating your own seawater you can remove a lot of the sodium chloride from it and have a mineral rich liquor leftover which can be diluted and applied to soil. This is what I think the good people at Sea-Crop are doing. They're taking seawater and have a method for removing most of the sodium chloride from it and their product is mostly the remaining sea minerals.

There is also a product called grow pro, and sold in smaller bottles as sea green, that is specifically designed to desalinate soil. It is a biological blend and probiotic that has been developed for commercial ag in southern california, where there are all sorts of salination issues.

My soil tests a bit low for sodium and I do apply seawater every now and then.

I'm of same opinion.  With the caveat that it was a balanced-low dose.  Soil test solves this.

Calcium is rarely the problem potassium is more likely the problem.  And you solve that with manganese, a Potassium Regulator.

"Excess potassium
if you have excess of potassium it will
create a calcium deficiency
and you cannot fix the problem by
putting on more calcium the only
way that we can manage that is
by looking at the other nutrients that
reduce that potassium's dominance
manganese serves as a potassium
regulator and when a plant has adequate levels of
manganese it will tend to down regulate
the surplus potassium and allow the
calcium to flow into the fruit" John Kempf

So this is a very important characteristic of managing plant nutrition for higher yields on all these various crops that reproduce at the nodes or on on Spurs that are produced at the nodes this is such an important piece I believe that if growers did this one thing if they began producing crops using calcium to get their vegetative growth energy instead nitrate or potassium.
They would reduce their insect and pest pressure by greater than 50% and they would increase yields by greater than 20% by doing nothing else if they just managed calcium differently and the key to managing calcium effectively is that calcium needs to come from the soil you cannot produce this effect Foilar Applications....
You need good soil supply of calcium every single day every 24 hours to the growing season and if one day the calcium supply is not adequate that's the day that the entire system starts falling apart and we get greater disease and insect susceptibility and potentially reduce yields as well.
John Kempf

Anne Miller wrote:Are Livestock Minerals bad for garden soil?  I thought minerals were good for the soil.  Just something to think about.

"The cheapest filler used in most range minerals is CALCIUM.  Calcium is cheaper than salt.  Why is all that calcium in your typical range mineral?"

"Look at a mineral tag that is 16% calcium and 8% phosphorus."

"Salt usually gets the rap for being the cheap filler. But because sodium is always deficient in forages, salt cannot be a filler because the sodium is needed."

http://www.cattlemineral.com/just-say-no-to-cheap-fillers-in-range-minerals/

Supercharge your soil with Minerals

https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/supercharge-your-soil-with-minerals-zbcz1411

I still this this calls for a soil test.