how to make soil amendments without digging up the yard?

Just saw a few minutes on TV on how they recycle the waste food from Las Vegas a very small USA city. Trucked away looking like garbage cooked and stirred and called slop. Then transferred to a pig farm. Got me thinking about Prions (Bacon to Bacon) and fasting tonight.

Whew..

Reply to
Bill who putters
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LOL. We're too deeply rural for them to get any customers except roos or wombats. The use the shredder goo to fertilise their wind breaks.

Reply to
FarmI

I'm pretty sure that would be illegal here. I'm sure it is in the UK since the last but one foot and mouth outbreak. IIRC, that outbreak was in the early 2000s and was supposedly caused from restaurant scraps which had a furrin origin.

Reply to
FarmI

Something else we feed chickens that people don¹t realize is beef products. And when those chickens eat that beef product, some of it falls into their litter. Well, we produce so much chicken litter in this country, because of these factory farms, and it is so rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, its land application uses are limited. So you have surplus chicken litter and nothing to do with it. What do they do with it? They feed it to cattle. So we feed beef cows chicken crap. That chicken litter often contains bits and byproducts of cattle. So we are actually feeding cattle to cattle, which is a risk factor for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. We actually feed cattle products to cattle in three different ways: chicken litter, restaurant scraps, and blood products on dairy farms. And all the mad cow cases in this country came from mega-dairies where, when that calf is born, they remove it from its mother immediately, because that mother¹s milk is a commodity, it¹s worth money, so instead they feed that calf a formula that includes bovine blood products, and again increasing the risk of mad cow disease.

Reply to
Billy

OMG! I feel sick just thinking about eating any US beef or eggs after reading that. Are consumers are warned of those practices?

Reply to
FarmI

Not by the corporate media. That's 90% of American media that is owned by 5 corporations.

Reply to
Billy

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if you add enough to improve the habitat for worms they will increase calcium levels. worms do secrete calcium.

also many plants do have calcium, that doesn't disappear when compost is made (or if it does where does it go?).

just be careful as adding too much compost all at once will likely encourage fungal diseases ( if you smother the grass).

agreed.

but really, it makes more sense to plant grasses or add other plants to the mix that will tolerate existing conditions. leave the amendments and compost for the garden beds that you want to alter to fit specific crops (much smaller areas, less expensive, etc.).

songbird

Reply to
songbird

The worms will just recycle the calcium already in the environment so this would have no net effect.

All plants have calcium (but not much) and it doesn't go away when they die or are composted (unlike nitrogen). However this is a very inefficient way to add calcium to your soil, especially if the compost came from your calcium depleted soil in the first place.

This is an option but if liming is suitable in the situation it is not difficult nor particularly expensive.

David

Reply to
David Hare-Scott

Ted, go get yourself tested.

Don't follow advice that may be well intended, but inaccurate for your situation. Do you ask for medicine recommendations online?

There are too many factors you need to know specifically, is your organic matter % too low? the CEC out of whack, your pH too high? What are the Ca levels to make you think you need more? Is it to bring the pH up a bit? what are your Mg levels. So do you use Calcitic or Dolomite lime and at what rate? I was very surprised to read that I had to use both types this year and at quite different rates, one for the garden and one for the lawn right next to each other

If you are in the US. The UMass (

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) has a soil test for 15$ that will give you a complete readout and recommendations to follow for your specific situation instead of this generalized, generic "advice". I usually get the results emailed to me within 2 days of reciept and a hard copy followup w/in a week. Your country extension agent will have more info and other choices. If outside the US I am sure you have proper labs available to you that do the same if you ask around. They also give organic recommendations and ways/methods to measure them.

And NO...If you follow directions, lime ( nor fertilizers) will not kill your soil, despite all the green noise you get from here.

Reply to
Gunner

Actually you can David, a quick method is to microwave them for a minute to cook up the leftover liquid inside, put in a coffee grinder dry...they powder up really well, but as you said, that is a lot of eggs!

Reply to
Gunner

- Hide quoted text -

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,=97 For a charm of powerful trouble,

And then there are the modern methods with known weights and measures

Reply to
Gunner

That may be of some use but I doubt that it is a fine as a high quality garden lime. What we need to be sure is some measure of the grain size but that is unlikely.

For those who are wondering what we are jabbering on about this is the issue. Garden (agricultural) lime is calcium carbonate which needs to dissolve in the water in the soil to be effective in either supplying calcium or raising pH. The problem is that lime is only very slightly soluble in water. Look at all those limestone and marble monuments (also calcium carbonate) around the place, they last for thousands of years (unless you get acid rain like the parthenon). The method of speeding up the process is to grind it finely which increases the surface area and so the rate of solution, even so it takes months to work. The degree of fineness matters. Take a cube one centimetre on the edge, its surface area is 6 sq cm. Grind it into grains 0.1 cm on edge, the surface area is now 60 sq cm, grind it finer to .01 cm on edge and the area is now 600 sq cm.

A new lime supplier started up round here who was cheaper than the rest. The farmers who lime their pasture though this was great until they realised that it was not as fine as the stuff they were used to.

David

Reply to
David Hare-Scott

no net effect if you are looking at it from a physical/chemical component level. i think that differs if you look at it from a nutrient tied up in certain forms level and how the worms actually ingest and alter the soil they ingest.

if a worm ingests a calciferous fragment they will grind it in their gizzard along with everything else they ingest. add to that secreted calcium. i think all of these things would increase available calcium in the soil (which is what is more important to plants than calcium levels tied up in forms that aren't very accessible).

wish i had a lab set up for this sort of thing as i think the experiments would be interesting in and of themselves.

i suspect the original poster is talking about adding additional compost from another source.

also true, but i'm not a big fan of encouraging lawns to grow even more so they need to be mowed more often, etc.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

calciferous fragment? ;o)

Worms can cycle the calcium in an environment, but they can't add to it by their presence. You need a source like dead (preferably;O) animals, limestone, or egg shells.

I think worms are big into leaves, forest litter, and mulch.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (Jul 10, 2007)

You'll like it.

Reply to
Billy

On Mar 16, 6:43=A0pm, songbird wrote:

Songbird, below info may help clarify:

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was originally thought that the calciferous glands excrete excess calcium, since earthworms living in calcareous soils ingest huge amounts of calcium carbonate (limestone/chalk) - sometimes too much to digest and absorb and so it is presumed that they must rid themselves of excess calcium. However, whether or not an earthworm lives in calcium-rich soil does not seem to correlate with calciferous gland function. The glands have been shown to contain large amounts of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase, which fixes carbon dioxide gas by reacting it with calcium to produce calcium carbonate. Carbon dioxide is generated by respiration within the earthworm and must be excreted since it is acidic. Experimental removal of the calciferous glands has been shown to result in increased acidity (lowering of pH) in the earthworm's coelomic fluid. This suggests that these glands have an important role in acidity (pH) regulation. All organisms function best within a certain pH range and the body must be maintained within this (often very narrow) range. The calcium carbonate excreted by these glands may be so abundant as to form crystals or concretions that pass out with the worm's faeces (or casts). Perhaps in winter these glands are not required as much, since the respiration rates of earthworms may drop with a fall in temperature. Calcium excretion may also help to neutralise the humic acids in the ingested soil.=94

Reply to
Gunner

the short way of saying any mineral particle that contains calcium (in some form).

those last two, i.e. calciferous fragments. :p

they may not add it, but i think they do make what is there more accessible.

especially the forest litter... but they do ingest fragments of rocks for their gizzards to grind stuff with. and if those fragments have calcium in them in some form the grinding will make that calcium more accessible to plants than it was previously.

some time when i am rich and famous i'll run a study in my lab and see what actually is going on.

note that some worm species do not dwell in leaf litter, instead they feed more in the subsoil and around plant roots. you don't find them on or near the surface unless they have been flooded.

i think i've read that one, but don't recall specifics at the moment.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

interesting, thanks for posting. it contains some speculation, but at least it does point to an actual experiment that was carried out and an actual result.

my searching last night did not find anything that was worth a mention here.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

You might try searching Google Scholar with key words like; Casting activity - Earthworm number - Mineral fertilizer - Organic manure - pH

- Earthworm biomass - fertilizer materials & earthworm activity, worm & calcium in soil, etc.

here is one such experiment I read yesterday when I went to see what is out there:

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Reply to
Gunner

"worms and soil calcium levels" worked ok, but my connection is slow, so it takes a long time to bring up most sites.

thanks, i'll have to check that out later when i get back on-line.

the few places i was able to actually read articles said that the worm castings were between 1.5 and 3 times the calcium levels of the surrounding soil. so that's a pointer in the right direction.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Someone assed: how to make soil amendments without digging up the yard?

Why would any normal brained person want to... if it's not going to dug up for planting just leave it lie fallow... why would you put mustard on a hot dog if you're not going to eat it?

Reply to
Brooklyn1

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