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Old June 18, 2016   #15
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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Seaweed is without a doubt one of the best materials for building soil that you can get on this earth. The rate of breakdown depends on your climate and time of year and what you do with it.
It is an important material for us here - I know people who made their soil entirely from kelp, in a community where there wasn't any soil (seriously - a rock). I've never heard of anyone here rinsing the kelp before they used it in any of a dozen ways. Kelp is loaded with potassium and when it's composted into the soil you will grow the sweetest vegetables you ever tasted.

I know one guy, he just brings home truckloads of kelp, throws it in a compost bin and lets it rot down for a year then puts it in the garden.

I've been using coarse chopped fresh or dried and crumbled kelp in my tomato containers every year. At the end of the season there's no bit of it left, it is all consumed and turned to soil. I decided to change out my container soil this season, so last fall I cycled it outdoors and built some new garlic beds. The garlic is doing fantastic. The soil after all was so black and rich - the stuff I got to replace it is nowhere near the quality that had built up over 5 years.

One year I built a lasagna bed for my garlic, with cardboard over the weedy ground, then layers of kelp and compost. Garlic did great. When I dug the bed the following year, I found some kelp at the bottom that had not decomposed over a full year. The cardboard below it was completely gone. That kelp was not cut up in any way just piled in a layer to start the bed. Bearing in mind we have a cool climate and a short summer, I reckon there wasn't enough heat at that depth to break all of it down. Experiment and see how it works in your climate.

Also I use kelp as mulch for garlic and it is by far the best. Used some grass clippings last year and comparing the grass mulched vs the kelp mulched, the kelp were earlier and more vigorous. Sitting on the surface as a mulch, the kelp will dry up and just sit there instead of breaking down as it does incorporated in soil.

Crabshells, shrimp shells are also fantastic soil amendments. Besides being rich in N and P they are a good source of calcium, and the chitin which these are made of, is a feedstock for beneficial soil microbes eg Trichoderma, which naturally occur all over the world but especially they are designed to feed on chitin - as when they prey on less friendly fungus organisms in the soil (also built of chitin). People pay money to add these organisms to their soils, which you can naturally encourage with this approach to soil building. For example there were studies done at the ag department here, showing that crab shell amendment prevented potato scab - a fungus pest in the soil.

So did I say enough??? Go for it! Lucky you, and a great plan to build your soil.
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