I don't believe you can ever reach a point where you don't have to replace what your plants take from the soil. All plants use nutrients, and unless replaced, the soil becoimes deficient. You can amend the soil with compost, manure, decaying mulch, organic fertilizer, minerals, etc., but whatever the form, you need to feed the soil, so the soil can feed you plants.

Ron
The Garden guy
http://www.TheGardenGuy.org
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Some people claim that long term biochar amendments make their soil like a nutrient sponge

Over the years this concept has been much-debated here. To my mind, it's like this: a given area of sun-fall will produce x-amount of bio-mass, depending on the other critical factors, namely soil characteristics, moisture, latitude and some others. To be sustainable in this given area one must take less than x. That's pretty obvious, right? If you take a young carrot plant with a big lush top and a smallish root, and eat the root and leave the top on the ground to be mulch then you've taken less than x. If you take a big mature carrot plant with a mostly withered top and big root and eat the root, you've taken about all of x. Not sustainable without inputs.

Now, "building up the soil" simply amounts to increasing the x of one's plot by robbing other areas of sun-fall of some of their x. If you keep doing that year after year, and take less than the constantly-growing x, it's like slowly spinning up a big flywheel. Eventually the heavy wheel gets going fast and then it takes very little energy to keep it spinning. That's where one can nurse along with very few outside inputs and still have nice harvests from a relatively small area (I'm not really sure how one "knows" when that is...). It can't last very many years unless one is taking much less than x.

Compost and other orgaic matter will eventually be all that your soil bacteria, the Soil food Web, needs to supply the plants you are growing with all they nutrients they need to grow strong and healthy. How you know you are there, or maybe have an imbalance of nutrients that could cause problems, is with periodic good, reliable soil tests done by a good soil testing lab.
Since it can take 3 to 4 years for the Soil Food Web to get properly functioning in soils that have been deprived of adequate levels of organic matter for years "fertilizers" may be needed for a time, but, again, only a good, reliable soil test will tell you what, if any, nutrients your soil might need. Adding some "fertilzers", organic or not, to soils that do not need them can create many more problems then it might solve because too much of one nutrient can inhibit a plants ability to uptake other, necessary, nutrients. A good, reliable soil test will also tell you what your soils pH is. Most all plants grow best with a soil pH in the 6.2 to 6.8 range where most all necessary plants nutrients are most readily available.
Since organic matter is the only part of the soil that will be digested by the Soil Food Web, it is the one part that will always need to be replaced.

So really the question is whether your compost and OM materials are coming from off-site or being generated on-site. I do both. A lot of off-site inputs can be in the form of captured waste, like cardboard and other people's fallen leaves and anything else organic that might end up being buried or incinerated.

A very good reason to grow a lot more plant matter than you will eat, in addition to being compost material and more sustainable is that you can fit in more diverse plant families which adds greatly to the overall garden habitat: more vigorous micro-herd, much wider range of insects and even birds and other small animals.

So really the question is whether your compost and OM materials are coming from off-site or being generated on-site.

Well, pnbrown, I live in the city, so bringing in a significant percentage of my OM from off-site will be my fate as long as I live in this house. We don't even get leaves in the Fall.

We're putting in gardens, so we'll have more plant matter in the future than we've had in the past, but I'm sure it still won't ever be enough. This year and probably next year we'll have a big boost in compost volume due to the sod we pulled up to create those new gardens, but that won't last.

Thankfully, I've found myself a great source of rabbit manure, so I'm probably set in that regard. I've been getting loads of the well-aged stuff to start out, though I suspect I'll get some fresh stuff in the future to add to the compost. At least I appear to be on the path of not needing to buy any more bags of stuff at Home Depot.

I can tell that after my amendments, this year's garden is on track to produce better than last year's, though I'm still using fertilizers (a combination of the Gardens Alive! stuff and Neptune's Harvest fish fertilizer). I'd love to get to the point where I'm not buying this stuff, either, but of course I don't want to stop too soon and doom my harvest.

we don't use fertilisers, and not for a long time, nutrients can be replaced using green type mulches and composting directly in the garden hence all our kitchen scraps go direct to the garden where the worms look after them nicely and deposit the benefits right wher it is needed. it's a system of recycling much like in nature. also we use urine and dish pre-rinse water in the gardens all full of nutrient material.

plants always look healthy and produce well.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

liera

You'll always need to replenish what the soil has contributed to your garden harvest as pnbrown said so well. And probably the only way to know what to add is with a soil test, at least until you're extremely familiar with what your crops have taken. Even so, a soil test every 2-3 years is probably safest, just so you know.

Another way I like to think of it: unfortunately, human gardens are not self-sustaining systems as a rain forest might be, where everything consumed is cyclically returned to the soil, including the bodies of the critters who consumed it. So we must consciously do what nature does in other environments.

I sometimes think it helps to envision something larger than our individual gardens to understand the balance needed if we use the land for our needs.

Liera,
Anney is right on the money! A garden by it's very nature can not be self-sustaining. Closely planted crops of limited varieties in small areas drain the soil of nutrients that need to be replaced.
In addition to organic matter, you will likely need other nutrients from tome to time, especially nitrogen, potassium and mineral amendments!

Ron
The Garden guy
http://www.TheGardenGuy.org
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"a garden by its very nature can not be self sustaining".

Ron, I don't agree with that statement, necessarily. It depends on what is meant by a 'garden' first off, I reckon. If we are talking about a small space that we want to make very intensive use of, then we are going to be taking most of the bio-mass production from that space in the form of crops leaving very little for compost or to lay on the soil. Larger gardens can be rotated with a wide variety of plant types and the majority of the production can be returned to the soil. That's what I was suggesting earlier. An experimental garden of this sort that I have been operating for close to ten years has taught me that one can very sustainably take about 10-20% of the total bio-mass production without external inputs - even without irrigation in my case. This is presuming once the soil has been built up to moderate fertility. That could be considerably increased by using urine, as Len said, which can be considered an internal input since the gardener and family are part of the immediate environment.

Hey pnbrown,
A garden by definition is a small, specified area where a limited number of specific plants are grown, that are not naturally occuring.
In nature, soil can be self-sustaining because a huge number of different varieties, each with different nutritional needs grow side by side. What those plants are will change if the soil changes.
When we plant a "garden" we are going outside the norm in nature, which causes soil imbalances, disease and insect infestation. We plant different, limited varieties, and to compensate, we need to amend the soil to replenish lost nutrients, if we want healthy plant growth.
In a natural ecosystem, plants grow, die, fall to the ground, rot, and become part of the natural cycle of life. There would also be animal droppings, the remains of animals and insects, and a healthy balance of all types of insects. Those plants can be grasses, weeds, trees, flowers, etc. Eliminate all of those, and plant only flowers, for instance, and you have a garden that cannot be self-sustaining without man's intevention.
In nature, left untouched, you will hardly ever find serious disease, insect infestations or soil imbalances for the plants native to that physical location.

Ron
The Garden guy
http://www.TheGardenGuy.org
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OK, I think I must have been extremely unclear in my original message.

I'm not talking about attempting to achieve any sort of sustainability with a small city lot (though of course I'll compost what I can and make use of it).

I'm not under the impression that I can do some amending up front and then never amend the soil again.

I'm wondering about when or if I might hit a point where I don't need to buy things marketed as "fertilizer," assuming I continue to amend the soil with compost, manures, and whatever other organic matter I manage to lay my hands on. One person suggested 3-4 years, which seems probably pretty reasonable (I didn't really think that only one year of amending would do the trick, no matter how good those amendments were, even though it seems to have improved the situation considerably). I'm wondering if others might have thoughts on what it would take to get to the "no fertilizers, just amendments" point.

Yea that was the impression I got from your post Leira, and it's something I've been wondering myself...to amend your soil to the point where it becomes self-sustaining and no "additional" fertilizers are needed.

I did read on here somewhere that someone owned a plot where they burned and incorporated alot of char into the soil...it never needed any watering or tilling, and it very rarely needed amendments if at all.

I think its totally possible to completely replace fertilizers if you were diligent enough

Leira, yes I suppose I have taken your thread on a little bit of a tangent. However, I think my logic applies even to very small spaces like yours. It's just that the edible productions of that small space would be even smaller without inputs. Any way, to directly address your question, I think that soil can be built up to the point where fertilizer requirements and other input requirements are quite small, but probably never entirely eliminated unless you want to settle for that 20-30% take of total bio-mass generated.

Ron, to quibble on. Some people cultivate a half-acre or more and call it a garden, others a bed of a few square feet. So the term really is quite vague. As are the terms 'fertilizer' and 'amendments'. You are quite right that anything the gardener does changes the environment and thus it's not the same as if there were no gardener. That's not what I am talking about. What I am saying is that it is possible to cultivate or otherwise influence a given area, and take produce from it, without external inputs and without degrading the system that one has created - whatever it is. It simply requires taking a small percentage of the total production. It's a very different way of looking at a garden - essentially I am talking about a permaculture. Small intensive gardens absolutely have their place, and can fit quite well inside a much larger permaculture system. For example, a couple thousand square feet of intensive vegetable beds could be maintained by taking compost material from a couple acres of orchard or other habitat without degradation. Or on a suburban scale, one bed by the clippings of a mown lawn and the fallen leaves of landscape trees. Without whacking that lawn with miracle-grow several times a year, too.

leira

Compost is fertilizer, of course, and I did understand that you were wondering how to know when your soil had reached a level where you didn't need to add specific fertilizers to it anymore, like bone meal, greensand, blood meal, etc. Some of them are "quick fixes", some work very slowly, sometimes not until the next year or so. Likewise, the nutrients in compost are also sometimes immediately available or slower, though well-aged and -integrated compost doesn't give the soil a jolt the way fertilizers do.

As long as you take crops from your garden, you'll be taking out some of the nutrients you added earlier, so to keep it in balance, you'll need to amend the soil with either fertilizers or compost to replenish it.

You can CERTAINLY do that with compost alone eventually, which has all kinds of goodies in it, but you'd be safer to get your soil tested at least every couple of years to see if your compost is bringing the soil back up to balance. If you got your soil tested at the end of the growing season and it showed few deficiencies in nutrients, I think that's the level you're aiming for. Then you could add compost alone (which is usually a balance of nutrients) and no specific other fertilizers and be pretty confident that your soil has what it needs to grow the next crop.

The point is that whether you add individual fertilizers or compost, you'll almost certainly need to replenish some soil nutrients on a yearly basis. Sometimes that will be compost, and maybe occasionally a specific fertilizer.

leira,
To answer you question, it might be a lot less time than you think. Get a soil test and that will tell you where you stand. If you have been using "compost, aged or composted manures, worm castings", you might not be far off. I would guess that all you would needs is a light nitrogen source and some occasional bone meal. The soil test is the key!

Ron
The Garden guy
http://www.TheGardenGuy.org
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g'day leira,

that was the point i reckon i got from your first post, and i related how we had reached a stage where we don't buy fertilisers as we see that process as being unsustainable, especially in our budget. we do very well without adding any sort of fertiliser as i have indicated, manure in the natural system isn't always there and not in the amount that would make a huge difference most of the natural system is rotting vegetation hence the use of hay mulches and then we top that by recycling food scraps and used water with urine into the garden.

getting manures would be un-sustainable also as we would have to find a source of a good clean manure where animals arean't bombarded with chemicals then we would have to go collect it and that here would mean a long drive, so i suppose you could say not environmently sound either. and all the back destroying work that goes with adding it to the garden goes against permaculture principals doing more work than is necessary.

as in nature the worms and microbes do the work to provice nutrients we copy that as best we can.

like we used to sign "works for us".

as a note to gardenguy, you need to make your link in your signature line a live hyper link so others who are little experienced can open your site easier. oh in case this is of some assistance don't use uppercase unless it is part of the url addy, keep it all undercase, url's are case sensative. send me an e/m i'll help you if you wish.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

Hey Len,
I also build and host websites and I have never found URL's to be case sensitive. Just for the heck of it, I will use all lowercase here to see if the link happens. Thanks,

Ron
The Garden Guy
http://www.thegardenguy.org
Informative articles, ongoing garden journal and
interactive message boards - All FREE!

Ron, technically URLs are case-sensitive, and so it's best to be scrupulously correct when typing them. However, you'll often be protected from this, and you'll never know it to be true -- this is what you've experienced.

Linda (who writes web applications for a living)

Len, I think that your situation and mine are somewhat different.

Living in the city with a small family, there simply isn't enough material between yard waste and kitchen waste to create a sufficient amount of compost for the needs of my garden (at least, certainly not in this initial soil build-up phase, and quite possibly never). Nonetheless, I compost what I can and make use of every last bit of it.

Also, living in the city, hay mulch is not easy to come by without a long drive. I feel quite fortunate to have found the local House Rabbit Network, which is a network of foster homes for pet rabbits from the animal shelter. I've got a large quantity of well-aged rabbit manure (plus fresh, if I want it) not far away and free for the taking, and the added bonus of knowing that I'm putting something that would otherwise be a waste product to very good use.

So, while for you hay mulches are great and manures are impractical, it's pretty much the opposite for me. I think the right answer here is to find what's readily available in your area, and make the most of it.

But again, I'm not really looking for information about how to amend the soil, as I've already put a lot of effort (thanks to this forum!) into figuring out what options are available to me in my area and my situation, and I feel really good with what I've worked out.

I appear to be well on the path to free and readily available soil amendments from now on...except for those organic fertilizers I'm still using in addition to my amendments, of course.

I read many stories on this and other forums about people who have amended their soil so well that they only add compost, mulches, etc., and never "fertilizers" (organic or otherwise), but still get great results.

Of course, some of these stories include things like "I've been working this garden for 35 years, and the soil is great!" I certainly believe that...but what about those of us who've been in our current homes for only one year? I don't expect to get there in 1 year, but I sincerely hope it won't take me 35.

I realize that every situation is different, but I'm hoping for some personal stories and/or educated guesses about how long it might take to bring a pretty reasonable but never-amended soil into the fertile glory that some of you seem to have, so that I can just continue with those amendments and need never buy another bag of "fertilizer."

g.g,

i should have explained further they are case sensative to the degree that if you use upper case then someone wanting your site doesn't they may not get a connect, for me i find keeping it all lower case makes it that much easier for those out there who are new to the web.

and in your case simply changing case will not make your link live in this forum, you must write it as a hyper link using htm language.

or add it into the space the forum provides below the text window. not picking just trying to help you get a live link on the forum.

hope i said it better this time linda hey? chuckle.

len

understand linda,

mine relies heavily on green mulches that i need to buy and we can access some sort of product locally, i appreciate gardening right in the city so to speak presents challenges to the gardener, so i applaud your successes etc.,. at a guess my small suburban garden would have consumed around 300 or so bales of mulch as well as around 100 bags of muchroom compost.

having said that i did not pick up on that fact that you are in the city, but still what i do here in my garden as i see it answers your question though somewhat broadly, so along those lines i would hope that somewhere in my answers you get your answer or part thereof.

for yes our gardens are in such a way we have no need to buy in any sort of compost, manure or fertilisers.

maybe out of all of this you might take up the challenge of finding a source somewhere on the outskirts of the city for hay of some sort? might be an opportunity to take the family for a picnic at the same time? produce agencies or feed stores are a good starting point.

len

Thanks Linda!
I was wondering what that space was for! Duh! Thanks again for the "heads-up"! I have never seen a URL case sensitive in any web browser. Where have you experienced this. I have never heard of it.

Ron
The Garden Guy
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Here is a link that might be useful: The Garden Guy

"linda asked,
I don't expect to get there in 1 year, but I sincerely hope it won't take me 35."

my gardens are only 3 years old and we used the process i mentioned right from day one with no need for fertiliser, yes it does improve as you go along but right now i would suggest it is at a sustainable level so what we do now feeds the garden which in turn feeds us.

i see your link now g/g, might be nowadays the system corrects the use of higher case?? but in the past if you entered a url and used higher case or spacing the link wouldn't work unless the page owner had it that way. but never the less you are live in the forums now.

len

Ron, check your email

Bob

Here is a link that might be useful: HTML Examples

Well, Ron, the spec (i.e. specification) says that URLs are case-sensitive. This doesn't mean that all of the software along the chain must enforce this case-sensitivity. It may work even if you change the case (and in practice, we've all seen that it usually does)...but there is no guarantee that it will always work.

When you're dealing with computer stuff, there's a general idea of "Be conservative in what you send, but generous in what you accept." So, if we follow that, we should all try to be careful, and type in our URLs with the proper case. However, the people who write web browsers (and all of the other bits of software along the way) understand that a lot of users just don't know the "URLs are case sensitive" rule, so some of them will use all caps, or StudlyCaps, or anything else that strikes their fancy, simply because they don't know. The browser writers want their users to be happy, not frustrated...so if the user types in "TheGardenGuy.org" and it fails, they have probably written something that converts it to "thegardenguy.org" and tries again, since this is a common mistake. So, things get fixed behind the scenes, the user gets the page they wanted, and is none the wiser about it all. The browser is being generous in what it accepts.

Don't even get me started about when you should and shouldn't put a "/" at the end of the URL. ;-)

Linda the Pedant

Linda, I would say the time required depends to some degree on the starting soil-type. A great silty loam starts off many times more fertile than an impoverished sandy soil, for example.

I can give you my home-garden case, which is a sandy loam. It started out with moderate fertility. I hit it with rotted cow manure, lime, greensand, and phosphate the first fall after clearing. After that I was pretty aggressive about getting various manures and seaweed on there. I made compost from the beginning, but tapered off quite a lot on the manures after a few years, and for about 6-7 years have been relying primarily on compost and urine. Sometimes I buy hay for mulch which ends up in the compost pile as well. So it's not at all a zero-input system, but it is low on fertilizer inputs if we don't consider compost to be a fertilizer. The aggressive build-up period was about 3-4 years, but perhaps I could have stopped earlier, who knows?

Well, pnbrown, our soil is actually pretty decent to start out with, though it's certainly lacking in organic matter. It's not sandy, not clay, and a good color. Not the "5 per shovelful" number of earthworms that some people claim, but a good number. I feel pretty lucky in that regard.

You're the second person to suggest that 3-4 years might be the magic number, and that feels pretty realistic to me. This one year's worth of amendments has been great, but clearly didn't get the soil all the way there. We may even be in this house long enough to reap the benefit.

You also remind me that I need to head up to the North Shore sometime later this season or next, and get a load of seaweed to add into the mix.

Thanks!

leira,
I actually had to go to the city to get leaves in the fall as our neighborhood doesn't have many large leafy trees.

In the fall, watch for people with straw bales as decorations. I picked up more than 20 bales of straw from people's houses and one church (all in the city as well. Seems that I can get manure out here, everything else is in town).

Here is a link that might be useful: Tales of a Transplanted Gardener

You could look in the Yellow Pages for organic landscapers and ask them to drop off grass clippings & leaves from some of their customers. They are more than happy to do it which saves on their dumping fees.

Ron
The Garden Guy
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Here is a link that might be useful: The Garden Guy Website & Blog

while your up grabbing that seaweed linda,

see if you can detour and grab a bale or 2 of mulch hay, it will do wonders.

keep us informed.

len

Len, I know you like your mulch hay, and I won't disagree that it's good stuff. However, everyone's geographical area, and everyone's situation, is different.

You've already said that you wouldn't use some of the amendments I use (like manures) because the distance and driving involved in getting them...yet when I've said that this is a reason that I haven't acquired any hay bales, you keep pressing me to get them anyway.

I have easy access to seaweed at a friend's house, surrounded by tightly packed houses and shopping plazas filled with big box stores. There aren't any hay bales to be found in this area, which is still, for all intents and purposes, "the city." We're talking about "you can take the subway to the ocean." That area hasn't been farmland in well over 100 years.

Even if I could find hay bales while making that trip, my compact car (with much more carrying capacity than my husband's compact car, but still great for parking the city) couldn't possibly fit a load of seaweed plus bales of hay. I think it could probably fit a couple of bales of hay if fully emptied out, maybe even 3 if I used the back set (which won't happen once a carseat gets installed next month), but I can't claim to have tried it. My husband's car might not fit one at all.

Plus there's the reality that at 7.5 months pregnant, I won't be hauling hay bales any time soon. If I'd acquired some in March or so, sure...but not today.

Living in the city is really a different world than living in a rural area. Having done both, I can tell you exactly how true this is. I consider myself lucky to be in a single-family house with a "huge" yard, and all of my friends say the same...even though I know that when I was growing up, I had never seen a yard so tiny.

Given who I am, and how I grew up, there are many ways in which I treat my little city yard like it was in the country...but in reality, it's not, and I need to accept that. Ditto on me treating my little Saturn sedan like a pickup truck...that car has hauled more construction supplies and gardening materials in its lifetime than most cars will ever see, but there are limits.

I'm all about doing the best I can with what's readily available to me...and I'm actually really, really happy with the groove that I've found so far. I've got some great garden amendments that are local, free, and easy to haul. My soil is getting better all the time. I'll find myself some mulch hay when & if this also become practical to my situation...but that certainly won't be this season.

I am trying the Ruth Stout system this year I have played with it somewhat last year in the flower beds & in the stawberries & like the results. I am adding it to the garden a little at a time.

Ruth Stout

jan ")

I remember reading in one of Dick Raymond's gardening books that he experimented with gardening simply with cover crops and adding no other ammendments. He would till in the cover crop residue every year or twice a year depending on the cover crops used. He claimed that plot was getting better every year. Most of the cover crops he used were edible, such as legumes.

"linda said,
you keep pressing me to get them anyway."

sorry that it came across that way linda it was not my intention, i just figured that the beach may take you near a source for hay, but the final decision is always going to be yours.

take care

len

Hi Linda,

I'm a city gardener too (a busy one with a job and two little ones). We bought our house three years ago, and I've never used any fertilizer other than a load of compost for the first two springs (I was too occupied with a new baby this year!).

I've been madly adding plants and shrubs to the mix of plants that were already here -- rhodos, azaleas, hydrangeas, boxwood, a couple of roses, peonies and crocosmia. These plants all continued to thrive despite the neglect of the owners previous to us. I've expanded beds and added many other plants -- hostas, brunnera, sedums, grasses, shrubs and trees -- without adding anything to the soil besides the compost.

We do compost onsite, but I haven't generated enough to use yet so am relying on the municipal stuff, plus all my coffee grounds, which I scratch into the soil. I'm also going to try and gather enough leaves to make leaf mold in the fall. I also don't do a cleanup in the fall, but wait until spring. I know some people feel this adds risk of bugs and disease, but I figure adding the decaying organic matter back into the soil is important.

As things stand, there are plenty of worms and other critters in the soil.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your gardening and your new baby!

I'm new to this site and I'm finding this thread very interesting and informative - thanks, all of you, for your comments.
I've been in my house here in San Jose for 25 yrs now, and my gardening practices and knowledge have evolved over these many yrs. About 18 yrs ago, I took a number of horticultural classes including soil science, however, since then, there's been a revolution in the thinking about soil. After reading Teaming with Microbes and learning therein about the Soil Food Web, I have, of course, developed a whole new understnding about what it takes to make great soil and a healthy, thriving garden.

On getting to 'no fertilizer' I would contribute this: in home gardens, we will always have to replenish the organic mat'ls which feed the organisms which in turn produce the substances which become food (nutrients) for our plants.
"Feed the soil organisms, feed the plants." But there are sev'l ways of providing nutrients, some slow processes that take alot of time to decompose, and others more rapid. Different mat'l creates different environments which induce different microbial populations to thrive. We need diversity. I think we need both rapid and slow, and the more diversity, the better.
I think of it this way: when I'm adding 'amendments' I'm adding mat'l which will serve to both improve the soil structure (improve aeration and water-holding capacity) at the same time I'm providing mat'l which will breakdown over time to release nutrients to organisms, which will in turn further break down into the nutrients which are then taken up by plants. Sort of a 'slow release' idea.
When I'm adding a "fertilizer" I add a plant mat'l that breaks down rapidly to do essentially the same thing,feed the organisms, except that it doesn't do much to affect soil structure. So I want both kinds, plant based amendments, and plant based "fertilizers." It's also a matter of providing different forms of nitrogen, differnt types of food sources which enhance different types of organisms, some which offer protective capabilities important in protecting against plant disease, etc.
My goal in my garden is to continuously replace OM in the form of mulches, both green and brown, depending on the plant, so that soil health is maintained and I don't have to till it or dig it up and disturb all the nice healthy colonies of organisms who are living there, b/c my plants depend on the health of the soil web.
Over many yrs, I did lots of amending and hours of back-breaking tilling. What I learned was all those tons and tons of amendments seem to disappear over time and the soil reverts back to heavy clay, except afer MANY yrs. It takes yrs to develop the humus which is the stable end product of decomposing compost which actually does alter soil structure. But even after you develop enough humus, you still have to feed the organisms, b/c while humus improves structure it doesn't feed organisms. The best way to maintain soil, is after having turned in a variety of amendments for say a couple yrs, be sure to keep replenishing your mulch layer yr-round. Never have naked soil. It's always best to always have something growing in it, too. Plant roots in the soil keep the important soil organisms alive and well. Essentially, you won't have to "fertilize", at least not with the blue stuff, or the like, but you will always have to "fertilize" at least with compost or mulches, which will compost themselves lying there on the ground around your plants. This is how nature does it.

Like many of you, I'm learning about what materials I can get locally, and especially what I can get easily and at low cost or free. I must say I envy those of you who can get seaweed!!!
I started cold composting a yr ago, but in my tiny urban yard and with no side yard (only 5' from house to fence1) there's no place to organize for hot composting, having a pile of green stuff and a pile of brown, have one compost pile going on, and one ready and are using it - just don't have the space. And I don't want to use up my scarce-enough-as-it-is gardening space, or be looking at compost piles from my lovely living room window....

I have had (3/8" particle size) ground fir bark delivered from a landscape supply place, I leave grass clippings on my lawn, and I buy copious amt's of an alfalfa-based fertilizer that has benficial organisms in it. I recently picked up coffee grounds from Starbucks, and I can't get by w/out a liquid, especially for my 40+ container plants, so I use fish emulsion, which works great. So far so good, but it is a somewhat expensive regimen. Many ppl really like their worm composting - makes a great liquid fertilizer - so I may try it. I'll keep eyes open for hay bales around halloween.

Where can one get soybean meal cheap or free? Anyone know? Any other ideas? I'd appreciate any and all advice!

Where can one get soybean meal cheap or free?

It's not free, but you will find grain meals at farm coops/grain elevators.

Thanks to justaguy. I'll check into it. (Like your 'name')

One more thought to leira on "How can you tell (if you need to add fertilizer)?

Plant 2 plants side by side. To one, incorporate organic fertilizewr into the soil. If it grows bigger and looks more vigorous, then I guess you would have your answer(!)

I think you will find though, that plants always benefit from the addition of fertilizer, especially an organic one b/c you can never have "too much" of it (what isn't needed remains locked in the organisms until it is needed, like money in a savings bank). It's a good thing that incorporating organic fertilizer is relatively easy though, just scrath it into the soil with a fork.

Depends what you call fertilizer... I find I still need some extra nitrogen, after 5 years of composting tree leaves and green weeds. I use rabbit food - $10 for 25 pounds - it's basically alfalfa meal with a few vitamins added. Works great, cheap, 99% organic so you can't "burn" anything.