Want to learn a lot about soil and compost? Watch this. Why we came up with Soil3: http://www.soil3.com/ We had a problem. We could produce high quality sod, send it to a customer, and they were installing it onto soil that was, to be frank, horrible. The Southeast is a great place to live. We have wonderful sunshine, good temperatures, etc., but the problem is that our soils are not that great. Most of the soils in the Southeast are either in the Piedmont, hard clays that are almost like a parking lot, or in the Coastal Plain, where they are sandy and have very little nutrient value. After a lot of thought, we decided that we needed an amendment. The best amendment we could come up with was a really good compost. We searched high and low, looking at literally hundreds of samples of compost from all over the Southeast, and found none that we thought were really worthwhile. We decided to make our own and that’s what we did with Soil3. Why can the Midwest corn belt grow corn so much better than the rest of the world? The simple answer is, they have an unbelievable amount of organic matter. The Great Plains soils are some of the highest in organic matter anywhere. It is cold in the winter so the organic matter does not break down. In the Southeast, because of our temperature, cultivation history, and erosion, our soils have very little organic matter. It can even be exacerbated in areas where development is going on. Nine times out of ten the original developer scraped off whatever topsoil there was and sold it off. So we are dealing with sub-soils that are poor quality but if we add organic matter we can fix that. Organic matter is the key to why Mid-western soils are so great. Have you ever wondered how things grew before man commercialized chemical fertilizers in the 1940s? Chemical fertilizers took off during that period because we built giant bomb manufacturing plants for World War II and after those were closed, we converted almost all of those into fertilizer factories. Nitrogen is the main component in bombs. Before the manufacturing of fertilizer, plants grew with the nitrogen cycle. That is how the good Lord intended plants to grow. Before the 1940s there were some fertilizers out there, mainly bat guano, but people depended on the nitrogen cycle. They fed cows the corn, then took the cow manure and put it back on the cornfields. Believe it or not, the Great Plains are a great example of the nitrogen cycle. For thousands of years the plains were covered in grasses, and those grasses, as they broke down, grew more. They all grew without fertilizer. Today we think we have to put down chemical fertilizers to make grass grow. If you have your soil in great shape, you don’t really need fertilizer. It’s because we’ve ended up in the strange place where synthetic fertilizer is a panacea and it’s the only solution we think of. If your soil is healthy, if it’s got great organic matter, you don’t need a ton of synthetic fertilizer. The ground will produce it’s own. We were all taught the natural way that nitrogen is recycled in science class but we all tend to forget it. Basically, plants and animals grow, they die, and then they are broken down by decomposers. There is other bacteria in our soil including the decomposers, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and nitrifying bacteria. It is all broken down to a point where the plants can pick it back up, use it again, and feed the animals. It is basically the circle of life. It’s only since mankind has learned the system and begun adding synthesized nitrogen that we’ve learned to cheat the system. It doesn’t have to be that way and it’s not the way nature or the good Lord intended it to be. What we are doing with Soil3 is recharging the natural battery. We’ve lost that natural bank of organic matter in our soils that really are the fuel to fuel that microbial activity that breaks the nitrogen back down for the plants to take back in a soluble form. So basically, we are recharging that system that mankind has messed up over the years because of our cultivation history. Soil3 has the appearance of fine coffee grounds and is easily spread through a fertilizer spreader. You won’t find any chunks that resemble sticks because we don’t use inputs that would cause that. What Soil3 does: -Increases Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), which is the soils ability to hold on to nutrients. -Increases water holding capacity by 4x -Provides natural nutrients -Provides beneficial soil organisms -Natural disease suppression Soil3 for Disease Suppression -UGA study shows that compost significantly reduces dollar spot in turf -Most disease causing fungi are naturally occurring decomposers that only attack plants under abnormal conditions (i.e. wet, hot, humid) -Compost keeps decomposers busy -Maintain soil flora and fauna balance http://www.soil3.com/soil3-benefits

• published: 21 Mar 2013
• views: 1390