Making good soil better

I ordered ~2 yards of "Bumper Crop"(lame website) soil amendment for my beds.  I'm concerned that after I remove all the sod pieces and associated soil that I'll be robbing my beds of substantial nutrients.  To offset this I purchased enough of this highly rated amendment to add 4" to all my beds.

24 2cu. ft. bags delivered at no charge by Flowerdale nursery.  I paid $9.99 a bag and they throw in an extra bag for every 5 you buy.  This works out to $8.33 a bag or $4.17 a foot!  OR... $112.39 a yard.  Compared to the material yard compost at $20-30 a yard this seems expensive, if you consider that the cheap stuff contains god-knows-what then I think it's worth it.  I don't want compost created from sod from a closed golf course that received Roundup treatments for 3 months before being removed.  Organic ain't easy and it ain't cheap.

Bumper crop contains composted:

• Forest Humus
• Chicken Manure
• Worm Castings
• Bat Guano
• Kelp Meal
• Oyster Shell
• Dolomite Lime

As I screen the clods and sod mesh from the beds I'll be tossing in copious amounts of amendment.  I've got 2-3 yards of homemade compost in the pipeline and expect finished product in 4-5 weeks which I'll top everything off with.

I'm becoming more and more interested in the French intensive methods of gardening and considering slicing off a small area in the yard to experiment with this more.  I may do a bit of interning over at Flowerdale nursery where Carlos is using the French intensive method exclusively; his beds look awesome, much more aesthetically appealing than traditional row methods.

I mixed up the special soil blend for my new blueberry bushes.  I'm planting the blueberries in containers for easy control of pH and other soil properties; apparently blueberries require a low (4.5 - 5.5 pH) and also benefit from a soil with actively decomposing organic materials.  It's much easier to create conditions like that in a container that in the ground.  I found a recipe online somewhere that called for the following:

• 1/3 small bark (1/4")
• 1/3 Acidic potting mix (like the kind for azaleas)
• 1/3 sphagnum peat moss
• handful of soil sulfur (drops the pH even further)

More on the blueberries later, in the meantime I made another time lapse!

Note to Steve: MS Movie Maker crashes when making time lapse movies.  Use PhotoLapse to generate uncompressed AVI (HUGE file) then import than into moviemk for titling and final render.