Your soil probably already has everything it needs if your harvests are at or near ideal.

Adding minerals to the soil doesn't equate to more minerals in your food unless it's deficient to begin with...or technically, some root veggies which exclude uptake yet still store the mineral content it's excluding at the exclusion point in the root tissue.

That said, a well sourced and varied parent material compost gives much faster plant available nutrition compared to rock dusts.

Thanks for your quick answer,

Still 1 question i dont get. I think i dont seem to get it yet.

Organic food from the market still has 50% less vitamins and minerals then years ago.

How can there be minerals in compost if there is no good source from the start (because the compost is made out of materials that don't have much minerals in it from the start).

for instance:
If i use manure from lets say cows that eats grass.. the grass doesnt have much minerals in it.. so no minerals in the manure. So the manure wont turn into mineral rich compost.

If i add old veggies and plants i dont use for compost. These plants already lack minerals. so how can there be minerals in the compost?

Or am i looking at it from the wrong perspective?

Hope you still find some time to answer.

This post was edited by VerticalGarden on Wed, Jan 21, 15 at 11:14

There is more to the commercial food nutrition question than the soil it grew in. Plants have been bred for decades now for various goals: higher total yield, uniformity of shape and size, storability/rot resistance, color, shippability/bruise resistance, and so on. How many commercial varieties do you think anyone is spending research dollars on to make them more nutritious? Or even paying attention to the effects of all this breeding on nutritional content? Precious little.

I am not arguing that our soils are not stressed from decades of certain farming practices. However, the soil is only one factor.

Grow some different varieties in your own soil, which you feed with compost, harvest them at the peak of ripeness and you'll have all the nutrition you need.

If you want to prove it to yourself, get a soil test that includes micro minerals - Fe, Cu, Mg, Mn, etc. You'll see that they are there. If you have an ag extension lab that will do compost analysis, send a well-mixed sifted sample of your own compost too. I did that and found not only is my soil just fine after years of compost additions, but my own compost rates higher than almost any commercial compost I could find locally.

I can't guarantee it but I doubt you have a soil problem. Especially if your plants grow just fine.

In case you haven't already, read a few threads here on soil mineralization. You'll find some interesting stuff, not all of which agrees with my post above. If you search this forum for "Azomite" for example, the first several threads that come up are all long and chock full of topics to chew on.

I'm not against mineral supplements, I'm just not sure they're needed in every case, but those selling them want you to think so.

Let's face it. As tox says, plants are bred to produce good qualities for handling and shipping to market. That tends to make them less nutrient dense.

If you have very sandy soil, it is more likely that it doesn't contain as many minerals as a more clay/silt/ loamy soil. Are more minerals a good thing? Usually very much so.

What I do is try to cover all the bases....lots of organic matter, and added minerals with good structure for good rooting.

"Organic food from the market still has 50% less vitamins and minerals than years ago. "

I don't know where that info came from, but it seems indefensible. Albrecht I think was concerned with the hidden drawbacks with chemical attempts to maintain fertility under massive farming pressures. Hope i disremember that right. Industrial farming is wonderful. However, there's something better but it won't scale well.

You make an assumption I don't think works. You don't grow plants in pure compost (pure?), no matter how hard you try. Nothing is simple there. In the dirt you have worms, caterpillar turds, dead grubs, dust from the sky, old seeds, bacteria, molds and other fungi, rotten little pieces of wood, silt, clay, beetle shells, iron and copper, maggots, plant roots, aphids, vole hair, sand, water, feathers, and on and on. Over all of that sits pH, which has a huge influence on mineral availability and uptake. The whole shebang is a chaotic system that you can damage, even temporarily obliterate (Mother Nature always wins in the end) by abuse, but you can't wear out minerals.

Except in rare cases, the use of special powdered sands from magical mineral sources to augment one's own set of minerals is a marketing triumph exceeded only by the people that sell you "better" fungus for your dirt. It doesn't matter if compost seems to be mineral-free. It isn't, and it gets mixed in with dirt anyhow. The compost works at many levels, the finest being a near-humus colloidal one that works just fine at transporting minerals and elements to your plant roots.

Compost seems to make the answers easy. Just keep up the organic levels and avoid the straight chemicals when you can (always!).

Thanks for your answer toxcrosadr!!

and i do agree with you. It did reassure me a lot about the compost thing. Thanks for that.

And the test kits are not that expensive as i imagined. I will do that!
I did read about azomite. and i wasnt optimistic about it either.

Thx!

haha, im a slow typer so i missed 2 replys, sorry for that

To grubby_me

If i where to start a farm on soil that is organic. but 3 years before been used for heavy fertilizing crops with pesticides and all. The organic crop i grow on that same field today wont have as minerals(but its still organic).

The soil will be overused.

But maybe thats to far from what i meant. although it would be nice to see it shifting to more nutritious food.

I live in an apartment so i cant make my own compost.

So i have to buy organic soil (with compost) but i just dont know if that contains enough minerals to enrich my vegetables.
(it isnt on the package either).

It is tempting to assume that fertilizer and pesticide based agriculture damages soil somehow, but that is not necessarily the case. Chemical use does not equate to no additions of compost or organic matter, for starters. And there is so much variability in soils, and so many ingredients in soil - as grubby so eloquently pointed out - that a blanket statement like this is not going to apply everywhere. Each soil, each garden must be evaluated individually. Bottom line, mineral supplements would be near the bottom of my list after sun and water, soil texture and organic matter content. Get those right and the vast majority of gardens will do just fine.

Hello Vertical Gardener,

I'm brand new to this gardening forum. I'm an organic farmer and gardening educator and just recently put out a short webinar series about what it takes to grow mineral and nutrient dense foods. It all comes down to making sure your soil web is healthy. You can check out the webinar on the attached link and you can read more about the soil food web on this link http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/soils/health/biology/?cid=nrcs142p2_053868 .

The soil food web makes the nutrients the plants need to put into their fruit available. When we disturb the soil by adding chemicals and rototilling we destroy Mother Nature's system. I would recommend researching how to make your soil web healthy. It can be done!

Good luck!

Here is a link that might be useful: Nutrient Density Webinar

While it has been quite some time since I've read Dr. Albrecht I recall that he was most concerned with mineral loss in soils lacking adequate levels of organic matter.
Good reliable soil tests done over the years on a variety of soils have shown that when adequate levels of organic matter are maintained the level of available minerals in the soil are adequate and there is no need to add minerals from some outside source.
Keep in mind that plants evolved in soils that had, as the only source of nutrients, large amounts of organic matter added every year and they have not yet adapted, very well, to growing in soils that lack adequate amounts of organic matter. Many plants still grow in soils that the only source of nutrients for those plants comes from the organic matter that is put into the soil each year, the leaves from deciduous trees and the grasses that die in the fall.

Thanks all, for the answers.
I think compost will does the trick. but :P!

i was at a university 2 weeks ago and they grew herbs at the speed of light!

These plants looked wonderful! but i know they lack minerals because they use non-organic fertilizer and non organic soil with compost to just the amount the plant needs (they didnt use pesticides and such). This is great for selling. It was the best condition the plant could ever wish for.

But a human needs minerals to survive. And with the food (also organic) we eat today the body doesnt get enough minerals for the long-run.

The food industry is growing towards a supplement way of living. Where we eat vegetables that are being raised in a couple of days and pills for the minerals (that rhymes).

I dont want plants in my apartment and balcony to grow good healthy and beautiful. I want them with minerals.

You guys say that i can achieve that with compost. I live in an apartment in a big city, so i cant make it myself. If i had a garden i would make the most beautiful pile of compost in the world.

I have to buy bags organic soil with everything in it. and the makers of the bags dont want to tell me whats in it. in terms of good or bad organic compost.

Is it still possible for the plant to make minerals from the soil i buy in bags?
And if not how would i be able to?

This post was edited by VerticalGarden on Thu, Jan 22, 15 at 6:55

I think you're assuming that compost does not provide the minerals plants need, but in fact it does. I'm looking at a spreadsheet of analysis results from 20 bagged and bulk locally available commercial composts that I tested a couple years ago. Levels of Ca, Mg, Zn, Fe, Mn and Cu were tested and they were all found in every sample. If you think about it, your whole concern is that plants take up minerals so you are 'losing' them. But parts of the plant go back into compost, recycling minerals. I suspect the exact amounts are not critical (within a reasonable range)because plants can adapt, finding and absorbing what they need. Compost is an ideal all purpose material for this because it has the whole range of minerals.

The makers of compost don't spend the time and money testing their batches, which vary seasonally depending on the available ingredients. Get a good middle of the range compost and your plants will adapt. Better yet, mix two or three. IMHO, spending any more effort than that on the nutritional value of your home grown produce is a waste of valuable time that could be spent on bigger problems. Not to sound harsh, that's just my two cents.

One more thought: If you are growing in containers and recycling the potting mix, I can see why you would be concerned over time. Some people don't recycle potting mix but just use fresh every time, which solves that problem. If you recycle all or part, maybe add compost each time, or a mineral supplement. It shouldn't take much of the latter, we're talking milligrams of most of these minerals anyway.

I just want the best for my body.

Your tip about that test kit is definitely on my planning before the season starts.

And mixing is also possible here so thanks for that tip to!! good idea. Really great answers here for the second day im on this forum :D didnt expected that.

Albrecht is deep reading, and I don't pretend to fully understand all that he wrote. However, there is a lot more to it than merely degradation from farming.

Perhaps more important is soil type, as Wayne mentioned, combined with historic precipitation. This is kind of the crux of Albrecht's work as I understand it - he may have been the first to carefully explore the effects of leaching over millennia. So in wet climates you get a lot of vegetative growth of generally low quality (because of the leached soils), and in very arid climates you get little growth due to the sheer lack of soil moisture. The sweet spot is where historical precipitation has been around 25-30 inches per year, in the temperate latitudes. Indeed, that is just where one tends to find the breadbaskets.

Stick around and enjoy the journey!

Happy gardening.

For mineral rich potting mix I use Dr Earth potting soil. I don't plant many pots anymore, since starting a garden at the new house. Recently I purchased azomite and applied it to every bed, not because I thought it needed it. I think one light application couldn't hurt and why not. I just try to add as many different things into my compost and hope every plant can get what it needs.

There is actually no way to tell, as far as I know, what minerals in what amounts would happen to be in say a carrot you may grow or even buy at the store, but a local farmers market would be a good place to get stuff that would be better then a large supermarket chain store. I really respect Dr. Earth, but I don't use that myself, since I make my own compost. And home made compost is not good for container gardening.

The package of dr earth does look fancy!

Well,, i went to this small shop this morning and bought some organic soil. it wasnt from a big brand i think.

The ingredients: its with cocopeat, bio-organic manure compost, bark compost, vegetable food grain?, vulcanic stone dust, baltic peat moss, normal peat, blood meal, feather meal, bonemeal, and more of those kind of products?.

As i'am typing this, i thought, is this good? its versatile.... but feather meal?

Feather meal is ground up chicken feathers. Bone meal is ground up cow bones. The more stuff they add the more people like buying it. But you can now research each of those ingredients online to see if they will help.

Feather meal is an organic nitrogen fertilizer (feathers are made of protein which has a lot of N). Bone meal for P mostly but also has lots of Ca. I think that sounds like a dandy mix.

Re: TT's comment about knowing what minerals are in foods...easily determined in an analytical lab, but it's not typically done and/or results published and it does cost $. Too bad it's not required as part of nutritional labeling, but produce is exempt from that anyway. I would not be surprised if some scientific studies have actually been done on that, hard data would be in the journals, not floofy websites by people selling supplements. :-]

I don't know where you are getting the notion that modern vegetables lack nutrients. They have nutrients just not as many as before. The solution for individuals is to eat more veggies not try to grow mineral dense vegetables on a balcony. That will not really get you anywhere. You would need to intensely cultivate about 1/4 acre to come anywhere close to feeding just yourself.

Here is a Scientific American article concerning this topic. Pay attention to the very end where the researcher says modern vegetables are still the best source of nutrients out there. It sounds like some woo site has gotten you unnecessarily bent out of shape about minerals. Was it Mercola trying to sell you supplements? That seems to be the most common one for this topic. The cortisol released into your system while you worried about minerals probably caused you more harm than the vegetables that have lots of minerals though decidely less than before.

Also, those plants in the university greenhouse had plenty of minerals. They were most assuredly using a fertilizer with plenty of micronutrients. Synthetic fertilizer isn't some magic potion that fundamentally robs plants of nutrients.

Here is a link that might be useful: SciAm soil depletion

If you all could entertain a really dumb question, what "minerals" are we all referring to? The word "mineral" is incredibly non-specific, being a solid inorganic substance of natural occurrence. When you say mineral, you could be referring to pretty much any inorganic component in the soil.

nil13, thanks for linking that article. It says in the second paragraph that the authors attribute the decline in nutrition to breeding practices, not soil health. Historically, the main criterion breeders selected for was yield. Faster growing plants generally outcompeted weeds and provided higher yields. But since they grew so quickly, "their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth."

My interpretation is that your cultivar selection may have as much influence over nutrition as your soil health. If you plant cultivars which haven't come out of a conventional breeding program and haven't been selected based on their yield, then these varieties may have higher nutrition since their growth and yield is potentially lower.

You've got some great answers here -- and one thing I picked up on is that it sounds like you might be about to go buy a soil test "kit." Better to spend your money on another bag of potting mix, as the kits are not very accurate, and soil tests are really for growing in ground anyway. (the recommendation for a soil test was to send your soil out to your local extension service or a university that does these tests. That was before anyone knew you were really container growing -- which is a whole different thing.)

Happy gardening! And there is a container gardening forum here, which might be very helpful to you.

Ferroplasm: Speaking only for myself, when I use 'minerals' in this thread it refers to ones that are known to be required by the human body. Fe, Mg, Ca, etc. The back of a multivitamin bottle would have a pretty good list we could probably all agree on.

However this brings up an important point, perhaps a tangent to the discussion but something to consider: There are other bioactive compounds in vegetables and fruits that are not inorganic minerals. Bioflavinoids, antioxidants, all that stuff. How do these differ between mass produced produce and produce (perhaps different varieties) grown in super healthy soil? Do home grown blueberries have more of the good stuff than store-bought?

One thing tragically missing from so many of these studies is actual control over their source materials.

You can't just treat a tomato like a tomato...an apple like an apple...it matters what variety/cultivar you're getting, what stage in it's life it's harvested, and mostly to a lesser extent what conditions it's grown in.

Someone testing a vine-ripened tomato from a known nutrient-rich variety trying to compare it to a shipping variety that was picked green and gas-ripened isn't a good starting point for any comparison. The shipping variety is already knocked down a peg before you put the seed in the ground and it's early harvest knocks it down even more.

I live in what used to be an inland sea, now a desert, but with a century of intensive flood irrigation, which is good way to deplete soil nutrients.

I started adding Azomite mentioned above by toxcrusadr. Read about it here, then saw that the local farm store was selling it by the pallet. I tried sprinkling it around the garden plants and particularly in my containers used to grow peppers and eggplant.

I've been doing that for three seasons now, sprinkling a small hand full at planting, all around the plants. There is a remarkable improvement in flavor for green chili peppers and garlic. Onions and tomatoes, not so much.

Thats admittedly an entirely subjective, non-scientific interpretation of results. :-)

I've started adding glacial rock dust and azomite to my raised beds and compost. The science behind it makes sense and seems sound. Plus it's a slow controlled action so it's not going to burn plants or anything like that.

It restores the soil, just like you are wanting. Trace minerals are important.

To toxcrusadr: home grown (organic blueberries) probably do contain more good stuff : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11327522 Something like this?

The thing about the minerals is. If the soil doesnt contain minerals. The plant wont make them. The plant will still grow.

it is true that the we dont know how they compared the veggies then and now.. but in a lot of researches they see less minerals and stuff.

Too bad there isnt a simple answer.

Here is a link that might be useful: Studie about organic vs non organic food

This post was edited by VerticalGarden on Tue, Jan 27, 15 at 11:12

I'm glad that we have some freedom to do as we see fit. The nay sayers can just run their own railroad. I will add some minerals to both my soil and my diet. I believe in a healthy synergy for the added minerals, enzymes, anti-oxidants, etc. In the soil organic matter feeds that synergy.

Vertical: Link broken. :-(

Link works again! i copied it twice in the box :)

I totally agree with you wayne! now i finally got the message you wrote before :D.
In what way do you add the minerals to the soil and diet?

Thx in advance

Thanks for that link. Two of the three 'free full-text' links after the abstract go to a different paper, but the third one works. Pretty interesting stuff - basically, for those who didn't look, this 2001 study compiled data from numerous other studies and found a statistically significant increase in minerals and vitamins in Organic produce vs. Conventional. Someone said earlier in this thread that studies should take into account different varieties, harvest time etc., which I agree with to a point. However if you're comparing organic vs. conventional in the grocery store, this kind of study tells you that statistically there will be a higher nutrient content in the organic, on average.

Now for the home gardener the question might be a bit different, as presented in this thread. But this result lends credence to the idea that feeding the soil a balanced diet (rather than pumping just NPK into the plant) will result in higher nutritional value.

Whether to use mineral amendments on your particular garden is a more complicated question that each of us has to evaluate individually. I've spent a very few bucks on soil tests and I'm convinced my high organic, clay based soil has plenty of minerals. YMMV.

VerticalGarden, I add some minerals to my diet both by eating food and supplementation of minerals and good synergy for those minerals...vitamins, antioxidants, enzymes.

I add minerals to the soil by adding organic matter; by raising deep rooting cover crop; by adding organic fertilizer; and by direct mineral supplementation.

NC, I don't disagree.

It is clearly close to impossible to control for all the variables. However, what do you make of this:

I just got to my FL garden, where it was totally overrun since early summer with weeds and velvet beans. Over the last couple years I have added azomite and hum-ate, and quite a lot of OM. Some mustards self-seeded over the fall and I picked them yesterday. My folks started a new garden a couple of months ago (because the weed-infested one was more than they could cope with), and that has got some large mustards ( planted a couple months ago from bought transplants).

The self-sown mustard from the older garden brixed at about 12 (crazy high for greens in fl sand), and the others were 5, which is more normal. That is quite a huge difference that could be hard to explain just from variety.

Add mulched/composted leaves and wood chips (from tree branches, not bags). They will develop extremely beneficial fungi and bacteria for the plants. Also, the tree's roots bring nutrients and trace minerals from deep down in the earth. As the leaves/wood is composted and decomposed, the fungi/worms/bacteria trade with the plant, making the minerals bioavailable to the plant, increasing your mineral content dramatically. They will also taste amazing.

Add mulched/composted leaves and wood chips (from tree branches, not bags). They will develop extremely beneficial fungi and bacteria for the plants. Also, the tree's roots bring nutrients and trace minerals from deep down in the earth. As the leaves/wood is composted and decomposed, the fungi/worms/bacteria trade with the plant, making the minerals bioavailable to the plant, increasing your mineral content dramatically. They will also taste amazing.

Bagged wood makes just as much fungi as any other kind of wood.

I'm going to throw in with jdsolol; shredded leaves and ramial mulch are hard to beat for OM for your soil. I'd suggest not tilling this into the soil but leaving it on top to decompose. Decomposed material will get washed into the soil by watering and rain.

The risk of tilling wood chips into soil is that the partially decomposed OM will contain the organic acids (intermediate products in the decomposition process) that prevent seed germination and root growth. Leave it on top and the soil won't be tainted by these byproducts.

As Dr. Alex Shigo wrote woody mulches (wood chips, tree branches, etc.) will create an environment that is fungi dominant, while vegetative waste, (tree leaves, compost, etc.) will create an environment favored by bacteria. Trees and shrubs like a soil that is dominated by fungi while flowers and vegetables prefer a bacteria dominated soil.

The primary problem with tilling in partially digested organic matter (high carbon material) is that the Soil Food Web will go after that and utilize, temporarily, all the available Nitrogen to digest that material leaving little N for the plants to use. The organic acids produced will be less of a problem than the Nitrogen deficiency would be.

IME many vegetables do fine in fungi-dominated situations but yields are lower.

Great tips again!

The bacteria thing is quiet interesting.

Its probably not possible to make a soil for green herbs and veggies where the amount of leaves and compost is related to a specific amount of minerals that go in my veggies and herbs?

Im spending my time reading a lot on internet this weekend about the uptake of minerals. But i cant find the amount of minerals in the plant coming with the amount of stuff in the soil.

Does anyone know if a plant is capable of taking up more minerals then it reads on the nutrition and mineral sheet of a product for a product (lets say spinach).

I dont know on what kind of spinach those nutrition and mineral facts where based (organic, non organic). So It would probably depend on the kind.

And i do know now that plants that look green and healthy probably have magnesium in them. But do they have the max amount :P?

Its getting very much scientific now :(

Here is an idea, I don't' know if it works, but buy the minerals that you want in a health food store, grind them up add them to soil. And compost increases mineral uptake as well.

Some people are actually interested in peoples health, other just grow food.

My understanding is that when the root-zone is saturated with way too much of one or more mineral, then this sets up complicated interactions where the result is deficiency in uptake of other minerals. This is very well studied, you can read about it anywhere. Plants do not have homeostasis the way animals do.

So a big excess is in general more difficult to deal with than an overall impoverished soil.

pn, That may be true, but in a well supplied garden of both minerals and organic matter, I am not finding problems much if any.

@verticalgarden: here's a source on magnesium -
http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/fixing-magnesium-deficiency.htm

The green in plants is from chlorophyll, which requires magnesium. Hence the association.

Recommendations for magnesium are lots of organic matter (as mostly from plants), and avoid having too much potassium - which interferes with plants' absorption of magnesium. Also avoid too acidic soil.

In short, organic matter/cmopost, avoid excess potassium.

Wayne, I agree, it's not easy to create an excess, but it does happen. I have gone overboard with borax for instance. Of course, I am famous for learning the hard way..

there is this hoagland solution wich Hoagland made for hydroponic use.

Its a solution with almost everything the plant needs in it. They use it today as a some standard for hydroponic fertilizer. Link is in on the bottom.

If been looking up small indoor and balcony compost bins! didnt know of there existence untill now. So i can try it out myself and bring the plant(for mineral testing) and soil(compost) to a lab for testing this spring (if its not to expensive).

and indeed an excess of something does reduce the amount of another. (the article of gardenknowhow explains it pretty good).

And this link was pretty cool to i think(i can only place on link in the optional link url?)
Its all the minerals in the soil explained in an easy way.
http://woodleaffarm.com/enlivening-soil/

Here is a link that might be useful: Hoagland solution wiki