TLO SOIL AMENDMENTS AND RECIPIES

Hey guys I found this post from about 6 years ago it was great read and I wanted to put it back out there in hopes maybe ppl wanna add to it. I've looked for a while now on as much as I kind find about amendments and it's impossible to find unless u search for each one individually. Anyway here it is credit goes to Matt rize!!!


The Soil Amendments Plus:
A soil amendment is any material added to a soil to improve its physical properties, such as water retention, permeability, water infiltration, drainage, aeration and structure. The goal is to provide a better environment for roots.
To do its work, an amendment must be thoroughly mixed into the soil. If it is merely buried, its effectiveness is reduced, and it will interfere with water and air movement and root growth.
Amending a soil is not the same thing as mulching, although many mulches also are used as amendments. A mulch is left on the soil surface. Its purpose is to reduce evaporation and runoff, inhibit weed growth, and create an attractive appearance. Mulches also moderate soil temperature, helping to warm soils in the spring and cool them in the summer. Mulches may be incorporated into the soil as amendments after they have decomposed to the point that they no longer serve their purpose.

Perlite: Volcanic glass that has been expanded with heat to make a white pebbles. Many prefer large size perlite because it lasts longer. For containers

Vermiculite: Vermiculite is a naturally occurring mineral composed of shiny flakes, resembling mica. When heated to a high temperature, flakes of vermiculite expand as much as 8-30 times their original size.

Pumice: Pumice is a type of extrusive volcanic rock, produced when lava with a very high content of water and gases (together these are called volatiles) is extruded (or thrown out of) a volcano.

Grits and Sands: Chicken Grit, Sharp Sand, Builder's Sand, not small grain or play sand!

Horticultural Charcoals:
Terra Preta = Compost plus Charcoal.
WoodChar: Low to medium temps, longer lasting. Soak in tea pre-use to charge with nutrients.
BioChar: Low temperature charcoal from wood & leafy plants.
Charred Rice Hulls: The favorite choice of many for DIY

Compost: Plant matter than has decomposed.

VermiCompost: Worm castings. Nutritional value varies. ie 1-1-1

Peat Moss: Common soil builder. Peat + Compost = soil.

Lime: pH stabilizer and Calcium/Magnesium source
Agricultural Lime: Calcium Carbonate. Hydrated Lime = faster
Dolomite Lime: Calcium and Magnesium Carbonate

Animal Sources: bat/bird guano, manures from livestock, oyster shells, worm castings, insect frass, eggs shells, chicken manure, humanure,

Mineral (Rock): Soft/hard rock phosphate, epsom salt, Azomite, lime,

Vegetable: Kelp meal, Alfalfa meal, Cottonseed Meal, Soybean meal, charcoal, Molasses, Vinasse,

Soil Recipes:
The first two are for containers. The third 3rd is for raised beds and the ground.
Soil Recipe 1:
8 large bags of high quality organic potting soil
25-50 lbs. of organic worm castings
5 lbs. of Blood meal 12-0-0
5 lbs. Bat guano 0-5-0
5 lbs. Fish Bone Meal 3-16-0
¾ cup Epsom salt
1 cup Sweet lime (Dolomite)
½ cup Azomite ( Trace element)
2 Tbs. dry Humic acid. Mix well, wet, let sit for 2+ weeks. Subcool's Supersoil

Soil Recipe 2:
40 gallons used soil, or organic potting soil
4 cups alfalfa meal
4 cups bone meal
4 cups kelp meal
4 cups powdered dolomite lime
30 pound bag of earthworm castings . . .
That’s the basic recipe . . . However we also like to use:
4 cups of Greensand
4 cups of Rock Phosphate
4 cups of diatomaceous earth. Mix well, wet, let sit for 2+ weeks. 3LittleBirds

Soil Recipe 3:
20% Compost
20% Topsoil
15% Steer Compost
15% Mushroom Compost
20% Pumice
10% Coarse Sand
Worm Castings
VAM Mycorrhizal Fungi Professor CC

Please post your recipes!

Amendments according to the Rev 2.1 True Living Organics Soil mix.


1/2 cup greensand Greensand takes Years to become available, if this is part of your really long term plan, that’s fine. This could be an initial amendment for starting a No-Till. There are other mineral amendments that will make themselves available to the plants faster. My goal when building a soil is not to waste money, and I would cut this out for sure.... but really see no harm in using it.

3/4 cup ground oyster shells (1 cup if no crushed oyster shells) Oyster Shells are about 95% CaCO3 or Calcium Carbonate. Once you realize that calcium carbonate is good, you can add it without having to be redundant. Gypsum, Crab, Oyster, they all have CaCO3 1cup crushed oyster shells (optional) Read the above.

1/2 cup dolomite lime (powdered) NO DOLOMITE LIME: As a rule, don’t use Dolomite lime, regardless of what you may have read in various gardening books, unless you are sure that you need Magnesium. (We don’t need any more magnesium in our mix, I promise) Dolomite is a high Magnesium limestone. Using dolomite will tighten the soil, reducing air in the soil and inducing anaerobic alcohol fermentation or even formaldehyde preservation of organic matter rather than aerobic decomposition. 1 and 3/4 cup prilled (pelletized) fast-acting dolomite lime Again, No Dolomite, it’s awful for your soil, especially with the alternatives available like gypsum.

1/4 cup blood meal Blood Meal: There are way better sources of Nitrogen than this. Blood meal is the blood waste from the cattle industry, Are you 100% confident that all the blood being used is free of any drugs, hormones, toxins etc? I'm not, and it turns out there is good reason to question the industry practice. Blood meal is made from dried blood that is literally scraped from the slaughterhouse floor. Even those farmers that use it admit that it is dangerous to breathe and can carry a number of harmful pathogens. Warning for animal lovers: Blood meal may attract your pets or other animals and if ingested can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Ingesting blood meal can also result in severe pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) which is bad news for your pup.

1/4 cup high N bird/bat guano 12-8-2 N-P-K Bat guano is bad to breathe, and isn’t sustainable to harvest. It’s also not magic like the hippies of yesterday seem to think it was. There are many alternatives to Bat Guano, but I understand many people still use it and love won’t grow without it. That is a personal decision you have to make. Personally, I’ve found that Comfrey, SRP, and many others are better and less dangerous to use.

1/2 heaping cup feather meal

Antibiotics and other drugs found in feather meal samples. That should be enough to show you how convoluted the feather meal industry is. This is another waster product from slaughtering animals. Here is a quote from an article sited below: "To do this, they examined 12 feather meal samples from the U.S. (n=10) and China (n=2). All 12 samples contained at least one antibiotic residue, and some contained residues of 10 different drugs (both of those were from China). While many of the antibiotics were ones used in poultry farming (or their metabolites), they also found drugs they did not expect. Most significantly, this included residues of fluoroquinolones, which they found in 6 of 10 U.S. feather meal samples. Why is this important? Fluoroquinolone use was banned in U.S. poultry production as of 2005 because of the risk to human health–so where are these residues coming from?" Source:http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2012/04/05/waste-not-want-not-poultry-fea/

1 cup un-steamed granular bone meal (like Whitney Farms brand)

Why not use Fish bone meal, comfrey, soft rock phosphate or something better than bone meal? Bones are stripped, dried, and ground. It is used for its high phosphorus and calcium content despite the fact that bone meal is dangerous to breathe and has been suggested as an agent for spreading Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) (the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy “mad cow disease”) to humans. “Do you feed your roses with bone meal? Not a good idea, says the world’s foremost expert on a group of rare diseases, found in animals, that sometimes make their way into humans. Breathing in the dust from contaminated bone meal could be deadly, says Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek (GUY-doo-sheck), a brilliant Harvard Medical School graduate and Nobel laureate. In his latest book, Deadly Feasts (Simon & Schuster), author Richard Rhodes traces the history of these diseases, called spongi-form encephalopathies, that reduce the brain to a spongy mass, causing their victims to stagger, fall, develop dementia and paralysis, and soon die a terrible death.” - “Mad cow disease” from feeding your roses? – Medical Update September 1, 1997. Brown, Edwin W. Bone Meal can also be a danger to your pets. If an animal consumes a large quantity of bone meal (for their size) it will form a cement-like ball in their stomach, which may block the digestive track and need to be removed by surgery. http://gentleworld.org/whats-hiding-in-your-organic-fertilizer/

1/2 cup bulb food

WTF? Why are we adding chemical fertilizers now? Okay, so someone said he uses an organic bulb food. (I looked it up, it's just more of all the above)

1/4 cup powdered soft rock phosphate Good good, but ¼ cup for more than 1 cubic foot of soil? I don’t think that’s enough!

(Also, SRP does contain heavy metals, please use to start your mix but don't start going crazy with it)

1/2 heaping cup powdered gypsum Finally, this makes some good sense… but again, not enough, it should be about 4 cups!

1/2 cup kelp meal Awesome! Kelp Meal is incredible.

4 heaping cups composted steer manure (this inoculates your mix with specialized microbeasties and primo organic matter) Manure? Really? We can get said “microbeasties” without that crap. If this manure hasn’t been composted properly it still has residual amounts of antibiotics etc in it.

1/2 cup azomite granular (add an additional 1/4 cup of greensand if no azomite) Azomite I’m fine with. Good source of minerals, but don’t stress if you can’t get it easy, no need.

1 cup granular humic acid ore (such as Down to Earth brand) Humic Acids are NOT all created equal. I prefer Liquid Ful-Power. It is 10 times better. Read this interesting write up on the Humic industry. There is SOOO much bullshit being sold as “humic acid” it’s ridiculous. Please read this entire article before buying any!http://www.bioag.com/educationandresources.html

1 cup alfalfa meal (or 2 cups pellets- make sure pellets are all organic no additives) I love Alfalfa Meal! With all the other stuff going on in this mix I would cut it to ½ cup. Or leave it out of the mix and use it for making botanical teas with.

1/2 cup rock phosphate granular (optional) Soft Rock Phosphate is better. This won’t be as available and also may have slightly more heavy metals etc.

1 heaping cup organic rice (important for the good fungi in this soil mix) First the rice will absorb water, then rot and while rotting it’s going to take up N to compensate for the use of carbon. Eventually it will turn into something useful but it would be better to use the rice for making BIM cultures and then adding that to the mix. It just doesn’t make sense to add it to the mix directly. (Thanks to JayKush for this comment in my notes)

For what it’s worth, if anyone wants to discuss the ridiculous use of spikes and layers along with god awful “Nutrient Teas” that make absolutely no sense…. Than we can talk about that stuff too. But be prepared, because there is nor reason to shove spikes into the soil or to use even more nutrients in these crazy tea concoctions with doses of calmag etc.

Here is what I would use for amendments to keep it simple:

Neem Cake ½ cup per cubic foot.

Sea Kelp Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.

Crustacean Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.

Mineral Mix 4-5 cups per cubic foot.

Comfrey Leaf – Handful top dressed and then covered with worm castings.

Once in the container, mulch with straw or with a living mulch like clover.

Sine were posting recipes here's coots organic mix.

"Equal parts of Sphagnum peat moss, some aeration deal (pumice, rice hulls, lava rock , pearlite- whatever is sitting in the garage) and finally some mix of humus - my compost, worm castings some black leaf mold I bought from the local 'worm guy'
To each 1 c.f. of this mix I add the following:
1/2 cup organic Neem meal
1/2 cup organic Kelp meal
1/2 cup Crab meal (or Crustacean meal when available - it has Shrimp meal with the Crab meal. It's a local product from the fisheries on the Oregon & Washington Coasts) *
4 cups of some minerals - rock dust

After the plant is in the final container I top-dress with my worm castings at 2" or so and then I hit it with Aloe vera juice and Comfrey extract. Or Borage. Or Stinging Nettle. Or Horsetail ferns. Whatever is ready.

The Rock Dust Recipe
4x - Glacial Rock Dust - Canadian Glacial (Gaia Green label)
1x - Bentonite - from the pottery supply store
1x - Oyster Shell Powder - the standard product from San Francisco Bay
1x - Basalt - from Redmond, Oregon (new product at Concentrates - about $18.00) ."

I believe that this recipe allows for some substitutions and that the biggest thing is to stick to the 1/3 SPM, 1/3 aeration, 1/3 humus and the amendments at the specified ratios. I have seen people (including myself) vary the actually "rock dusts" but don't if you can help it, and certainly don't omit the oyster shell flour in place of something else.

Living organic soil is very rewarding to grow in, give it a try, no one has ever looked back after going this route."

* Coot highly recommends the crustacean meal. In his own words, as of 4/20/15;

******************

The common theme I'm getting from everyone is to make sure your compost / ewc are as fresh as possible.

I found a local vermicompost that hopefully will be some good shit, literally lol.

Greenthumbs256 said:

Amendments according to the Rev 2.1 True Living Organics Soil mix.


1/2 cup greensand Greensand takes Years to become available, if this is part of your really long term plan, that’s fine. This could be an initial amendment for starting a No-Till. There are other mineral amendments that will make themselves available to the plants faster. My goal when building a soil is not to waste money, and I would cut this out for sure.... but really see no harm in using it.

3/4 cup ground oyster shells (1 cup if no crushed oyster shells) Oyster Shells are about 95% CaCO3 or Calcium Carbonate. Once you realize that calcium carbonate is good, you can add it without having to be redundant. Gypsum, Crab, Oyster, they all have CaCO3 1cup crushed oyster shells (optional) Read the above.

1/2 cup dolomite lime (powdered) NO DOLOMITE LIME: As a rule, don’t use Dolomite lime, regardless of what you may have read in various gardening books, unless you are sure that you need Magnesium. (We don’t need any more magnesium in our mix, I promise) Dolomite is a high Magnesium limestone. Using dolomite will tighten the soil, reducing air in the soil and inducing anaerobic alcohol fermentation or even formaldehyde preservation of organic matter rather than aerobic decomposition. 1 and 3/4 cup prilled (pelletized) fast-acting dolomite lime Again, No Dolomite, it’s awful for your soil, especially with the alternatives available like gypsum.

1/4 cup blood meal Blood Meal: There are way better sources of Nitrogen than this. Blood meal is the blood waste from the cattle industry, Are you 100% confident that all the blood being used is free of any drugs, hormones, toxins etc? I'm not, and it turns out there is good reason to question the industry practice. Blood meal is made from dried blood that is literally scraped from the slaughterhouse floor. Even those farmers that use it admit that it is dangerous to breathe and can carry a number of harmful pathogens. Warning for animal lovers: Blood meal may attract your pets or other animals and if ingested can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Ingesting blood meal can also result in severe pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) which is bad news for your pup.

1/4 cup high N bird/bat guano 12-8-2 N-P-K Bat guano is bad to breathe, and isn’t sustainable to harvest. It’s also not magic like the hippies of yesterday seem to think it was. There are many alternatives to Bat Guano, but I understand many people still use it and love won’t grow without it. That is a personal decision you have to make. Personally, I’ve found that Comfrey, SRP, and many others are better and less dangerous to use.

1/2 heaping cup feather meal

Antibiotics and other drugs found in feather meal samples. That should be enough to show you how convoluted the feather meal industry is. This is another waster product from slaughtering animals. Here is a quote from an article sited below: "To do this, they examined 12 feather meal samples from the U.S. (n=10) and China (n=2). All 12 samples contained at least one antibiotic residue, and some contained residues of 10 different drugs (both of those were from China). While many of the antibiotics were ones used in poultry farming (or their metabolites), they also found drugs they did not expect. Most significantly, this included residues of fluoroquinolones, which they found in 6 of 10 U.S. feather meal samples. Why is this important? Fluoroquinolone use was banned in U.S. poultry production as of 2005 because of the risk to human health–so where are these residues coming from?" Source:http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2012/04/05/waste-not-want-not-poultry-fea/

1 cup un-steamed granular bone meal (like Whitney Farms brand)

Why not use Fish bone meal, comfrey, soft rock phosphate or something better than bone meal? Bones are stripped, dried, and ground. It is used for its high phosphorus and calcium content despite the fact that bone meal is dangerous to breathe and has been suggested as an agent for spreading Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) (the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy “mad cow disease”) to humans. “Do you feed your roses with bone meal? Not a good idea, says the world’s foremost expert on a group of rare diseases, found in animals, that sometimes make their way into humans. Breathing in the dust from contaminated bone meal could be deadly, says Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek (GUY-doo-sheck), a brilliant Harvard Medical School graduate and Nobel laureate. In his latest book, Deadly Feasts (Simon & Schuster), author Richard Rhodes traces the history of these diseases, called spongi-form encephalopathies, that reduce the brain to a spongy mass, causing their victims to stagger, fall, develop dementia and paralysis, and soon die a terrible death.” - “Mad cow disease” from feeding your roses? – Medical Update September 1, 1997. Brown, Edwin W. Bone Meal can also be a danger to your pets. If an animal consumes a large quantity of bone meal (for their size) it will form a cement-like ball in their stomach, which may block the digestive track and need to be removed by surgery. http://gentleworld.org/whats-hiding-in-your-organic-fertilizer/

1/2 cup bulb food

WTF? Why are we adding chemical fertilizers now? Okay, so someone said he uses an organic bulb food. (I looked it up, it's just more of all the above)

1/4 cup powdered soft rock phosphate Good good, but ¼ cup for more than 1 cubic foot of soil? I don’t think that’s enough!

(Also, SRP does contain heavy metals, please use to start your mix but don't start going crazy with it)

1/2 heaping cup powdered gypsum Finally, this makes some good sense… but again, not enough, it should be about 4 cups!

1/2 cup kelp meal Awesome! Kelp Meal is incredible.

4 heaping cups composted steer manure (this inoculates your mix with specialized microbeasties and primo organic matter) Manure? Really? We can get said “microbeasties” without that crap. If this manure hasn’t been composted properly it still has residual amounts of antibiotics etc in it.

1/2 cup azomite granular (add an additional 1/4 cup of greensand if no azomite) Azomite I’m fine with. Good source of minerals, but don’t stress if you can’t get it easy, no need.

1 cup granular humic acid ore (such as Down to Earth brand) Humic Acids are NOT all created equal. I prefer Liquid Ful-Power. It is 10 times better. Read this interesting write up on the Humic industry. There is SOOO much bullshit being sold as “humic acid” it’s ridiculous. Please read this entire article before buying any!http://www.bioag.com/educationandresources.html

1 cup alfalfa meal (or 2 cups pellets- make sure pellets are all organic no additives) I love Alfalfa Meal! With all the other stuff going on in this mix I would cut it to ½ cup. Or leave it out of the mix and use it for making botanical teas with.

1/2 cup rock phosphate granular (optional) Soft Rock Phosphate is better. This won’t be as available and also may have slightly more heavy metals etc.

1 heaping cup organic rice (important for the good fungi in this soil mix) First the rice will absorb water, then rot and while rotting it’s going to take up N to compensate for the use of carbon. Eventually it will turn into something useful but it would be better to use the rice for making BIM cultures and then adding that to the mix. It just doesn’t make sense to add it to the mix directly. (Thanks to JayKush for this comment in my notes)

For what it’s worth, if anyone wants to discuss the ridiculous use of spikes and layers along with god awful “Nutrient Teas” that make absolutely no sense…. Than we can talk about that stuff too. But be prepared, because there is nor reason to shove spikes into the soil or to use even more nutrients in these crazy tea concoctions with doses of calmag etc.

Here is what I would use for amendments to keep it simple:

Neem Cake ½ cup per cubic foot.

Sea Kelp Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.

Crustacean Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.

Mineral Mix 4-5 cups per cubic foot.

Comfrey Leaf – Handful top dressed and then covered with worm castings.

Once in the container, mulch with straw or with a living mulch like clover.

Click to expand...

thats Jeremy from build a soil pointing out the many flaws in the TLO mix on their blog.
https://buildasoil.com/blogs/news/9885098-why-tlo-dissecting-the-rev-mix-line-by-line
That's the link to his post on their site