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[Gordo]

You may be taking way too much turmeric, but that's a tangent.  The best  way to get great garden soil is compost.  If you can't create enough from your own kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, and fall leaves, pick it up from the nearest public compost site.  Mix finished compost in with your soil.  If you can dig some dirt out of some nearby woods, that will work too.  A little rotten wood on the bottom of the garden is also recommended (absorbs nitrogen as it rots, releases it to your plants later on, the fungi in it help plants grow (mycelium).

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[mccoy]

Following the tangent, sometimes I eat lots of turmeric as well, maybe over 3 tbs on vegetables but maybe I find no consequences because that's not constant. I wonder whether it might be the source of some postprandial bloating.

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[BrianMDelaney]

Speaking of heavy metals and soil... and turmeric: just a reminder that ConsumerLab and other testing groups have found heavy metals in many spices, including turmeric. I switched to curcumin supplements for that reason (they may also be contaminated, but likely less so). As a matter of efficient use of my time, I simply avoid anything grown on the Asian continent (the non-island part – Japan I'm not so worried about). I'm missing out on some safe things, but I don't have time to figure out which items are safe and which are not. Heavy metals and other contaminants in China and India, excessive pesticides in the "Stans"...: not worth the risk (or the time needed to micromanage the risk).

 

Oh, to have a plot of land! (With neighbors less irritating than Dean's.)

 

Brian

[Todd Allen]

I'd expect it to be excellent but VERY hard to justify that price.  It's meant for seed starting not for amending soil.   When it comes to compost, especially when addressing poor quality or contaminated soil, you want a lot of it.   We probably use in excess of a quart of compost per square foot of garden bed yearly just to top dress lightly to maintain well established excellent soil.  It could easily take 10 times as much if starting with bad soil.

 

If you are going to garden to produce significant food you'll want to find free sources of good quality source material appropriate for composting.   Some things we get free locally in unlimited quantities: horse manure, spent brew grain, saw dust, wood chips and expired/spoiled produce.  Leaves and grass clippings are seasonally available.  When possible we go for materials with organic origin.

 

You probably will start small and if you are just growing a few square feet of kale it really won't matter very much how you go about it, but it won't be practical to scale up to a level where the food return on labor is reasonable when using expensive inputs. 

 

What do you think of this as a source of compost ( any objectionable ingredients)?

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[BrianMDelaney]

Hi Brian, what brand curcumin supplement do you use?

 

LEF Bio-curcumin. Chose it mostly because it was cheapest.

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