I went out into the cow field and scraped up another bucket of black dirt to play with. The spots where I had scraped down to the sub soil in the spring now are covered in several more inches of the black dirt:
My tea was made when I steamed a couple socks of this dirt and brewed them in a five gallon bucket for two days. I added molasses, because I was trying to cultivate the good bacteria.
The stuff worked great, but I am wondering if what I created was beneficial because it was a humic acid extraction.
I'm scared to not heat-treat the material, because I'm concerned it might have gnat larvae/eggs or other bad guys in it. But then I'm killing off the good bacteria that would be the point of making tea. Unless they grow back in the two days of brewing, what I'm ending up with is an extraction of everything water-soluable in the material.
Whatever is in the soil that makes it work, I know for sure it works like magic in the garden. I grow huge plants in only a few inches of this dirt.