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Old March 25, 2015   #38
bower
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
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Nice to see the test results, Scott . It will be cool to see how they change year by year.

Just a comment about wood chip compost, in my experience wood chips are very slow to break down unless you have a lot of hot manure with them (like chicken manure). Even horse manure doesn't break down wood chip bedding very readily in my garden, just not hot enough.
That wouldn't matter if you weren't nitrogen deficient there, but afaik wood chips will suck up the available nitrogen and make it unavailable to the plants.. until they eventually break down. You could lose the benefit of any additional Nitrogen source, at least for the present season. At least, that's certainly the case in my climate here, with low pH a general condition of the soil. Also, talking about conifer wood chips, which are acidic as well as slow to break down, they will depress the pH even further.

$10 a trailer load is a great deal for fully composted stuff! I would go for it, in a flash...

It may be though that with your soil type and climate and the type of wood chip being composted (deciduous trees I bet) it is a whole other story?

Just to make your day, the native soil at my place was pH 4 (f-o-u-r!) when I started the garden almost 25 years ago... 6.5 sounds good to me!
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