Up till now, my wife's just grown vegetables in the city. She had about 600 square feet of rich, no-till soil.
She tells me she used Garden Tone in the spring, plus some epson salts. Garden Tone is a mixture of cottonseed meal (for nitrogen), powdered rock phosphate (for phosphorus) and greensand (for potassium). Soil tests indicated a need to supplement magnesium, so that is why she added the epson salts.
Interestingly enough, soil tests did not recommend lime. EVERY grower in west Tennessee needs to lime their soil, all except for my wife's city plot.
Out here on our new farm, she tells me that she will grow "green manure," tha t is, a specially prescribed blend of clover and grasses (as recommended by the local agricultural extension service based on soil tests). Eventually she'll turn that growth back into the soil so it can compost.
She's also been composting kitchen vegetable waste, tree leaves, grass clippings and has plans to go scoop up the neighbor's horse manure.
She is not sure if it is practical to think of using something like Garden Tone on 2 acre plots, however, she says she will side dress some of the heavy feeding plants (e.g., tomatoes and corn) with Garden Tone when the plants are four to six weeks old.
In the spring back when growing in the city, she would use a product that they call "soil conditioner," which is finely shredded tree bark, to mulch her plants. She bought it at Home Depot.
In the autumn, she'd fork the mulch into the soil before she was finished preparing the garden bed for winter. Then she'd add some straight cottonseed meal into the soil with it, to provide a source of nitrogen. The mulch coupled with the cottonseed meal would compost over the winter, and in the spring, she'd plant again, using Garden Tone as fertilizer.
She's not sure that she will be able to do that out here though, because of the cost of buying mulch enough for two acres.
