How much compost to apply to your soil depends on what your soil needs. What you want to do is get the humus level, residual level of organic matter, up to around 5 to 8 percent and maintain that. That determines how much compost, and other organic matter, you need to add each year. These simple soil tests can help you determine that.
1) Structure. From that soil sample put enough of the rest to make a 4 inch level in a clear 1 quart jar, with a tight fitting lid. Fill that jar with water and replace the lid, tightly. Shake the jar vigorously and then let it stand for 24 hours. Your soil will settle out according to soil particle size and weight. For example, a good loam will have about 1-3/4 inch (about 45%) of sand on the bottom. about 1 inch (about 25%) of silt next, about 1 inch (25%) of clay above that, and about 1/4 inch (about 5%) of organic matter on the top.

2) Drainage. Dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains’ too quickly and needs more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up.

3) Tilth. Take a handful of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a finger that clump should fall apart.

4) Smell. What does your soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria will be and the nicer your soil will smell.

5) Life. How many earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that is not healthy.

Hi Ken

I do not apply compost to my land at all. I use the organic materials that people generate from their properties and till that into fallow fields for crop production. The bulk of the trimmings are grass clippings and leaves. I do get some plant materials like pulled up flowers and other garden plants but the majority of that material gets composted in the windrows I build in the fall. For now I run my fields on a once in three year rotation for application, two years of crop then a fallow year in which the trimmings are applied.

I do give away and sell some compost. People always ask how much they should put down. For the most part, on existing lawns as a topdress, I tell them not more than 1/4 inch. For gardens and such, 1/2 to 1 inch worked into the top 3-6 inches of soil. Now keep in mind our soil up here is pretty darn good, I'm not talking sand boxes or plain clay. It's black and it can be productive. There have been cases, e.g. topsoil has been stripped during construction or particularly 'tired' soil, where more compost could be used, but then I'm only talking a couple of inches or so extra.

Can compost be over applied, absolutely.

Different plants uptake different amounts of nutrients. Composts vary as well and, compost is a 'slow release', so coming up with a definitive amount applicable to all is not possible. I go with guidelines. I am in partial agreement with kimmsr, 5-8% soil OM is a nice target.

Sorry, if you or anyone else is looking for an absolute black and white number, there isn't one. Any one who tells you there is one, is delusional and anyone who says there is not a top limit scares me.

Let me give you an analogy I use, if a person has a headache and they take two Tylenol and it relieves the pain, should the person take 20 Tylenol to make it work even better?

And now I'm off to de-bag 8 metric tonnes of leaves/clippings delivered yesterday, fun fun. :-)

Lloyd

While granting that someone might be able to overapply compost, in 36 years of fertilizing with compost and organic mulches, I've never been able to. Most of my Organic Matter: compost, seaweed, hay, newspaper, leaves, pumpkins, coffee grounds, etc. is applied from April to January, mostly as mulch, as I'm able to gather it. I got a truckload of seaweed yesterday, which I'll spread all over my vegetable beds. I won't have anywhere near as much as I'd like to, but it won't be my last trip to the shore either.

My land management has become a little radical, though, ever since my rich, native soil was scraped off during construction here, and I refused to buy (inferior) topsoil back from the same guy who took mine. I now apply unsightly, deep, deep mulches in large areas of my yard each year in an attempt to rebuild some depth on top of the gravel and stones. I spent one fall covering a 15x20 patch of lawn across the road with 8" of seaweed, at least 24" of leaves, hay bales I found at the dump and broke apart, covering the area under books of hay. I topped that deep mulch off with about 48 post-Halloween pumpkins I found while driving around. The next year, naturally, that area was covered with a pumpkin crop, which I didn't mind. It's beautiful soil now, where I've planted an apple tree, three grape vines, my cucumbers, a small army of Giant sunflowers waving over the edge of the road (until the UPS truck hit them doing about 20), and a bunch of black-eyed susans. I hope to bury that area under seaweed this fall.

I covered the lawn in front of the house under about 50 bags of OPBL two falls ago. I yanked the bags off the leaves, leaving shoulder to shoulder, three foot deep, large, bag-shaped, lumps all over the front lawn. (My brother saw them and offered to send my nephew over to rake.) That area broke down quite quickly and is where I planted six of the dozen Haydrangeas that Hayseedman gave me. I'm covering that area again this fall with deep leaves and seaweed.

I have several garden beds, several small, some larger, and they all clamor for more compost than I can ever make. I treat my favorites: my enkianthus, my dogwoods, my two apple trees with a nice circle of something organic each fall and spring.

I try to make a lot of compost, too. Today, I'm driving to the Brewer dump where I hope to pick up a two-layer truckload of leaves, grass clippings, and discarded dahlia bulbs. I'm excited.

annpat, it makes me grin envisioning you feeding all that good stuff to your soil. (And picturing your Giant sunflowers was fun until I got to picturing the UPS truck plowing them down!)

"at least 24" of leaves"

AP, if you were a farmer in New Jersey, you'd be in violation of the regs. I don't know what other states have for regs (if any), I just use the NJ #'s cause it's easy to find.

"Farmers are permitted (New Jersey Register, NJAC 7:26-
1.12. Nov. 7, 1988) to apply up to a 6-inch layer
of leaves annually."

AP is sorta supporting my point...people often have no idea what amounts of nutrients they are applying to their soil. If they don't know what they are adding, there is no possible way to know if the plants are using it all up or if the nutrients are accumulating/leaching.

Lloyd

Thanks again one and all,
I have grown gardens for years and never had problems when I was dumb as a rock. Just plant seeds and things grew. Now I am more sophisticated, ( I read these forums) and boy can I screw things up. I recently added so much mulch (I thought had been composted) I wrecked my garden. Trying to get it back on track now,. Having some success with help from these forums, and a little common sense.
It still is all very enjoyable.
Thanks again folks
Ken

It is unfortunate the anyone would establish such an arbitrary number as "6 inches of leaves" when the real number should be the humus level in the soil. I know some sandy soils can take much more than 6 inches of leaves and still not have enough humus to make 5 to 8 percent in the soil. I am not sure how much would be needed for clay soils since it has been many years since I worked them.

I'm having to reevaluate my methods. Thanks a bunch, Lloyd. (smile)

I care very much about managing this yard responsibly. We've owned the property since 1948, and it's on a lake I love. So here has been my logic:

The property was stripped of about two feet (in some places less, in most places much more) of my upper soil under the guise that it was necessary to build "roads" around the property for construction vehicles during the construction of a large addition. Anybody but an idiot (me) would have stopped this pillage in its tracks. (We have enough land to pile the rich soil they took away.) After construction I was left with my house sitting in the middle of a gravel and rock, deeply sloping yard. I allowed the earth moving man to sell me one dumptruck load of "topsoil" and when I saw what crap it was, and when I thought about the corrupt topsoil business in general, I decided not to purchase any more soil.

That left me with a gravel and stone yard, on a lake, with phosphorus pouring from the land and road into the lake, because the land could not support plant life to ebb the flow. I decided I needed to build up a deep humus base to ebb the flow of phosphorus to the lake. I also thought (here's where you think (and I guess I begrudgingly agree) that my thinking has been faulty) that my planting of gardens (as long as I didn't use manures to feed it) would help grab up the phosphorus and actually be good for the lake---at least initially.

An aside here: I consider myself a good steward of our land. I haven't mowed the lawn since around 1994 and I haven't raked any leaves or picked up fallen twigs and debris since the late 90s. These were decisions I made specifically to help keep my lake healthy. I keep a brush pile near the shore and I put hay bales between my largest vegetable bed and the lake. The only fertilizers I use are the raw mulches I mentioned, and compost (of which chicken manure is a feedstock) that I make and, generally, apply as mulch. In my former gardening life, on different land, I was a yearly applier of manures, but in a gesture to the lake, I suspended that practice when I began gardening here.

I have recently become concerned about my planting of non-native species on this formerly all native yard and have been yanking out the vincas and burning bushes, etc. that I planted when I moved here year-round in the 90s. I have been more concerned, however, about an invasive buttercup that the one load of topsoil I bought brought to my yard. The buttercup is native, but not native to my yard and it threatens to kill all the native blueberries and wintergreen and partridgeberry that do remain here. Not having herbicides as an option, I dealt with the buttercup problem the only way I, as an organic gardener know how: with deep and/or smothering, mulches. (I had already employed deep mulches on the roadside of the camp to try to reestablish a layer of humus over the construction gravel.)

Last year, I brought at least 50 bags of leaves here and have---almost---successfully smothered the buttercup, which thrives in the gravely soil around my gardens and the verge approaching the woods. I've been thrilled with my success: killing the buttercup, and reestablishing, I hope, the native ground covers, ebbing the flow of phosphorous from the yard and road, and rebuilding the soil that was robbed.

Till now.

I would point out that the Lake Smart Committee praised my yard (and, especially, my deep mulches) this year, but they're not a smart group, and they missed that my methods might also dump excess nutrients into the lake, if the gardens, shrubs, bushes, and trees aren't able to take them up because of saturation. (They also advised everyone on the road to plant blueberries near the shore, which resulted in my nearby blueberry field having large tracts of my blueberry sod stolen.)

I do have soil tests done every three or four years, and while a few things are over optimum, most are not. I haven't had a test done, though, on the areas in the yard where I deep mulch, and do not garden.

So that's how my thinking's been....

How would you handle my yard, Lloyd? I ask with genuine interest. Soil test monitoring of the area between garden and lake? By using less nourishing mulch, such as wood chips? (Shudder.)
Keep in mind that I can't plant a single thing here without sticking my spade into gravel and rocks. (This is not true of the areas where I immediately (in 2002) reestablished gardens with heavy OM amendments.) And allowing that I believe that my growing as much food as I can is good for both my health and my carbon footprint. How would you monitor my runoff, and do you not agree that a layer of some sort of (plant supporting) humus over the gravel is better for the lake than not?

In case it's not obvious, I understand what the other poster on the other thread does not, which is that land only uses the nutrients that the plants on it are able to take up. Everything else is run off and problematic.

It's pouring here and you've ruined my morning, dear.

Ken saying, "Thanks again one and all,
I have grown gardens for years and never had problems when I was dumb as a rock. Just plant seeds and things grew. Now I am more sophisticated, ( I read these forums) and boy can I screw things up. I recently added so much mulch (I thought had been composted) I wrecked my garden. Trying to get it back on track now,. Having some success with help from these forums, and a little common sense.
It still is all very enjoyable. "

Ken, could you give details of how your uncomposted mulch ruined your garden? I'd be interested. I believe you, I just haven't had that experience, and that includes quite uncomposted weedy stuff under raised beds. Mind you, I wouldn't want to use great quantities of wood mulch in the garden as a soil amendment myself -- I was wondering if that is what you did.

Phebe greenhouse
Using wood mulch is exactly what I did. A friend has a yard where they do stair railings, porch railings and they make knotty pine furniture. When they peel the logs the bark is used as driveways through the yard, so it is pulverized to very fine , almost sawdust grindings. He gave me about 50 yards of the stuff and it looked and smelled great. Thinking it would be considered compost, as it looked and smelled just like compost, I put about 30 yards of it in the garden, which is about 2500 sq ft of pure clay. The next year I couldn't make anything grow at all, so I had a soil test done and found it was totally void of nitrogen. Now I tiptoe around adding things to that garden to correct this. I hate to mess it up in another way. That's what leads me to ask so many questions on these forums on occasion. It's great to hear all the opinions
Ken

Neat, Ken --- I'm pleased I guessed right. Well, too bad that you lost a year, but that was quite an interesting experience and thanx for describing it.

I expect that by now the wood mulch has or will finally decay and release the nitrogen and other stuff gradually and your garden will recover.

It's good to make really BIG mistakes --- shows you are a man of initiative and energy. Besides, later you get to tell the story. [:-)

Hi AP

I wouldn't panic over what you are already doing. While it is important to consider the total amount of 'stuff' one is adding, it is also important to remember that plant materials and most composts generally release their nutrients very slowly vis a vis synthetics and manures. I would suspect mulches, especially high C:N ratio, are even slower as there are less organisms breaking the material down. If I recall correctly, we here in the Province ;-) of Manitoba , have a total ban on spreading manures within a certain distance of a body of water. So you not using raw manures at all near your lake is a wise choice.

And I agree wholeheartedly that growing plants act as buffers and filters. Marshes are a classic example of that. So growing plants is excellent IMO. I'll not comment on the type/species of plants one chooses as that is waaayyy out of my league.

Does your lake shore exhibit any kind of 'super growth' or possibly an algae bloom as compared to anywhere else on the lake? What I'm thinking of with this question is that age old adage "the grass is always greener over the septic field". (Most rural folks will understand).

You mentioned you were "over optimum" on a couple of nutrients on your test, which ones?

Lloyd

Our lake is still a healthy lake; it's deep and it's spring-fed, but it is not the same lake as the one of my youth. We had a gravel bottom when I was a kid; the lake is now mucky in places, but certainly not more so in front of my place. I imagine I exercise better land management than most people on the lake, other than people like my immediate neighbor who has come to his property probably no more than once every two years, for a weekend, maybe a week, for the last 63 years.

Most of the people on the lake maintain fertilized, manicured lawns, Most of my neighbors use Round-Up and pesticides when the mood strikes. The Lake Smart people were excited by what is the scourge of the neighborhood---my unmown lawn. When I saw that, I proudly pointed out that I don't rake or do anything to make my yard look nice.

My last soil test was prior to my fairly recent efforts to use deep mulches (mostly leaf) to repair my stripped soil. I've always been a heavy applier of OM, though. My above optimum levels were potassium and sulfur. I think I'll have my soil tested going into fall.

I haven't really known exactly how to garden lakeside without manure, so justifying my methods by the fact that I'm trying to return my plantings to a more native state, and I'm trying to build soil that might fix nutrients in place, I've allowed myself to fertilize with compost and fast-decomposing mulches. I've always promised myself that after I (and my primary helpers, the worms) rebuilt the topsoil, I'd back off on thick compost application (for the lake's sake). However, I have a hard time resisting forking compost into, say, the garlic bed I'm planting in my rare sunlight---25 feet off shore---this week. I may move the bed, upon reflection. I can put something less needy in that spot.

With nitrogen and phosphorous being the two most focused on pollution wise, I'd relax. If other residents are applying granular to their lawns and they are anything like people in town here, then they are probably over-applying.

At the Legion we started to apply around an inch of two year old compost to the flower beds every fall and two 1/4 inch top-dressings to the grass two years ago. We will see how it goes. Unfortunately, the flower bed also gets used as an ashtray so mulches are not allowed. (Grrr).

I tried growing a garden plant this year using straw as a mulch, seemed to do okay.

Lloyd

My favorite OM is anything that I've ever found crawling with worms after it's been in my garden for six months---hay, straw, eggshell halves, paper egg cartons in my compost, clam shells, newspaper. When I say I don't use manure lakeside, I'm being disingenuous, because that would imply that I underestimate the nutrient contribution of the castings produced by the worms for whom I try to make my garden attractive. That sounds silly, but I'm truly depending these days on earthworm activity for both tilling and fertilizing my garden.

I garden by observation, because I'm lazy, under-educated, and a creature of habit. I've long observed that my gardens do better with more OM rather than less, and that failing gardens can generally be brought around by improving the tilth of the soil with OM. Of course you're right, short of noticing a plant producing foliage over fruit, I'm generally unaware of what excesses may be leaching away. What I am not unaware of is the danger of ground source pollution to the lake.

I'd love to think of ways to protect my lake, while still (vegetable) gardening near it. Most of my frivolous gardening (flowers) are grown 150' from the lake. I also keep my compost piles, composting chicken manure piles, and woodchip piles at least 135' from shore.

This conversation is making me want to move my manure piles to the backmost part of my yard, adding 15', and the compost pile I was building down front in the vegetable bed, I think that I'll move across the street and barrow it next spring like I usually do. If I make more of an effort to pick up pet manure in the tall grass, I can give myself some slack regarding the rich garlic bed.