Your Soil, Read Two Ways

Your Soil in One Page

This is a well fed but badly balanced garden soil, a pattern that can follow years of generous compost and manure. There is plenty of organic matter and a large phosphorus bank, but the two tests agree that potassium and boron are short. Magnesium is taking more than its share of the soil’s holding sites while calcium is short both in the bank and in the water roots drink from. The job is not to pile on more of everything. It is to move the balance.

This score counts the measured flags in the saturated paste for 62.5% and in the mineral reserve for 37.5%, because there is no biology test here. When biology is tested, the weights are paste 50%, mineral 30% and biology 20%. Priority findings carry an extra penalty. It is our field guide for comparing rounds, not a certified lab grade. A single number never replaces the lab results and the reasons below.

Bottom line: Feed the measured potassium and boron shortages, bring calcium back into balance, and stop feeding the phosphorus and magnesium this soil already owns. Keep compost, extract and living roots working so the mineral bank becomes food the plant can actually reach. Retest before calling it fixed.

The Plan

Each line starts with the two lab tests, then the action. The default amounts are for 100 square feet of garden; switch to farm scale for acres. A rate only makes sense when it is sized to the shortage, split so roots can use it, and checked against the next report.

If calcium had been severely low (saturation under 55% or less than 60% of the desired exchange calcium), this plan would call for Eden soluble calcium instead, with its rate set by Cure Soil. This garden is moderately low, not severe, so gypsum fits the report.

None, and why

Always on

On open beds, top dress Cure Soil compost, water it in within a day and follow with fresh living extract. Elaine Ingham showed that the organisms in the soil food web release nutrients as they feed on each other: biology is how the mineral bank gets spent. Fermented humic acid helps hold minerals in plant reachable forms and feeds fungi. If you skip the biology, a soil can own plenty and still leave roots hungry.

Before extract goes through a hose, check municipal water for free chlorine and sodium. Free chlorine must read zero at the hose end, or it kills the extract you paid to make; sodium brought by irrigation can build up week after week.

For an organic site, check each input against your certifier’s approved list before applying it. Document a tissue confirmed deficiency before spraying micronutrients, or you risk both a needless dose and a certification problem.

How to Read This Report

Saturated Paste · What the Roots Can Drink

This is the primary lens. Every row describes what is dissolved in the water around the roots right now. A low dissolved number may be a true shortage or a mineral stranded in the bank; page 5 tells the difference.

What the paste is saying. The water around these roots is low in salt but not balanced. Potassium is at 5.9 ppm versus 12–15, calcium is at 22 versus 25–30, boron is at 0.04 versus 0.08, and magnesium takes 34.5% of the dissolved base cations. The soil is not starving everywhere; it is spending unevenly. Page 5 shows whether those shortages are real holes in the bank or only slow withdrawals.

Ammonium Acetate · The Soil's Bank

This test reads the reserve held on mineral and organic surfaces. “Found” and “desired” are scaled to this soil’s total exchange capacity, not a blanket fertilizer recipe. When a reserve and the paste tell the same story, the case for action gets stronger.

Where the two tests agree. Potassium and boron are short in the solution and the bank. Calcium is below the Albrecht saturation band and low in the paste. Magnesium is high on the holding sites and takes too big a share of the dissolved cations. That convergence, rather than any one arrow in a table, is why the plan feeds potassium and boron, rebalances calcium, and leaves magnesium alone.

Soil Story, Mulder’s Chart and Next Round

This garden has been loved hard. Years of compost and manure left it with 5.8% organic matter and a phosphorus bank 3.2 times the guide. That is a real asset, but it is not permission to keep feeding everything. Too much phosphorus can tie up the little minerals a plant needs to defend itself.

Under that full pantry, potassium is short where roots drink (5.9 ppm against 12–15) and in the reserve (306 versus 437 lbs/ac desired). Boron is thin in both places too. Magnesium takes 19% of the holding sites while calcium only holds 58%, below William Albrecht’s 60–70% band. The water roots drink tells the same story: there is too much dissolved magnesium relative to calcium.

So the move is precise, not loud. Feed the measured potassium shortage in small splits, correct calcium with the right carrier for this pH and sulfur read, and nudge boron gently. Leave phosphorus, magnesium and extra nitrogen alone. Keep living compost, fresh extract and fermented humic acid working: the organisms are how a stocked bank becomes food in the root zone.

Then come back to the same spots. If potassium, calcium and boron move toward their guides without salt or other excesses climbing, the garden is finding its balance. If they do not, we read the next numbers and change course. That is how we treat the soil, not the symptoms™.

Mulder’s chart

Next round

Retest three anchor numbers from the same spots and the same 0–6 inch depth in 6–12 months. That keeps the lab method and sampling depth steady, so a change in the numbers is a change in the soil rather than a change in where you dug.

1. 01

   Paste potassium · now 5.9 ppm, moving toward 12–15.

2. 02

   Calcium saturation · now 58%, moving toward 60–70%.

3. 03

   Paste boron · now 0.04 ppm, moving toward 0.08.