Cooking up some soil mix

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Crashbasket

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Going to be TPing some babies into their final mix in about 2 weeks. The soil mixes are recycled potting soil that has been sitting in a big compost pile mixed with horse, chicken, cow and alpaca manure for about 6 months and has a wonderful earthy kinda forest floor smell to it. Here's the mix and the incremental additions:

8 gal of the recycled soil mix I described above
8 gal perlite
4 gal mushroom compost
4 gallons fresh worm castings (these things are very much alive with goodies as they were sourced from my own personal worm farm and since I didn't have enough, I sourced the rest of them in bulk directly a local compost company
8 gal rinsed coir

...amended with.......

6 cups of FF HF 5-5-5
4 cup greensand
4 cup Neptune's Harvest crabshell
2 cups finely ground oyster shell
2 cups crushed oyster shell
2 cups powdered Dolomite lime
2 cups granular lime
2 cups Blood meal
1 cup of pelletized Seabird Guano 10-10-1
1 cup unsteamed bone meal 6-9-0
3 cups bulb food 3-8-8
2 cups soft rock phosphate
4 cups gypsum
4 cup kelp meal
1/2 cup Biozome
2 tbsp of a very cool mineral/humate amendment that is available here locally called Earth's Fortune.
2 cups of Soil Secrets Protien Crumbles
I'm also grinding up a bunch of old moldy alfalfa that I got from bales of alfalfa hay that got wet and we couldn't feed to our horses and dumping about a gallon of this into the mix.

I've got about 300 dry gallons of this mixed so far and I'm cooking it by keeping it damp in fabric grow bags on seedling mats and turning it occasionally. It's also helping to keep the greenhouse warm which is saving me a bit on propane costs. Of course, the seedling mats are using electricity, but they also accellerate the cooking process so to me the little extra expense is worth it.

:cool:

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Greenhouse Nov 23 004.jpg


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Rosebud said:
Wow, very nice. Looks good. Happy cooking.

Thanks.....:) Here's the recycling operation:

Used soil in big fabric bags with lots of old manure. The stuff I'm screening has been cooking for months with manures and plant matter added. That's moldy alfalfa next to the bags. I screen this and make alfalfa meal out of it and add it to the mix.




Screened wheelbarrow full.....around 5 cu ft. Took about an hour to do by hand.

 

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