Any body use Complete Organic Fertilizer?

[Plantaholic12]

Steve Solomon published a recipe for Complete Organic Fertilizer:

4 parts seed meal ( cottonseed or soybean )
1 part lime ( mix dolomite or ag )
1/2 part bone meal
1/2 part kelp meal

I have been using it for years and am beginning to think there is too much nitrogen.

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Any other users?

Tom

[pondgardener]

Looking online for 'Steve Solomon Organic Fertilizer Recipe', I found a number of articles, including the one linked below. He may have lowered the nitrogen levels.

https://www.heartinessapproach.com/home ... fertilizer

[bower]

Lucky you to have a recipe... as with cooking, I have a tendency to wing it, and/or I just don't have a measurable product.
I do use lime, bone meal and crushed kelp for tomatoes every year. Sometimes chicken manure pellet. Fresh compost or well rotted horse manure.
The lime I don't measure, just sprinkle on and dig in. I think dolomite lime is better, but hasn't been available in recent years.
The amount of kelp is variable depending on supply, but I think about six-eight ounces by volume per plant.
For tomatoes in containers I use a six ounce cup of bone meal dug into the soil in the planting hole. Close to equal the kelp.

Somehow I ended up with too much N this year. The plan was to precondition the reused soil by adding the lime, kelp and chicken pellets and horse manure well in advance, to encourage worms to eat up any remaining tomato roots from last season. This worked great the year before.
However, either I was too liberal with the chicken manure, or the horse manure was more potent than I thought. Probably the latter. The pickup load had sat on a tarp all summer until being distributed to garden beds in the fall, then the last bit was scraped up rather late for use in the greenhouse. In hindsight, it's possible some N from the top of the pile washed down and became concentrated in that last bit at the bottom (even though tarp is technically leaky).

[Plantaholic12]

Thanks for the links. I've been using the COF for so long ( eight or ten years ) and only in the last few years have noticed extra leaves.

Been using the 50 pound bag of cottonseed meal and 10 pounds of others ( last kelp meal was 50 ) that when I visited a Harbor Fright I picked up a returned 1 cubic foot cement mixer. Well worth it.

The COF recipe is for Pacif Northwest gardening but the last time I reviewed the literature Solomon was in New Zealand ( or Austrailia ) so I figured the stuff would work anywhere.