Many of you know that I am a big proponent of soil testing.  Actually, I’m a big proponent of all types of lawn, plant and soil testing.  But you’re probably unaware that there are many tests that I outright dismiss, and there are other tests that you may not have ever heard of that I’m studying very hard to learn and make recommendations from.

I find that many tests are frustrating and worse yet, some are useless.  Why?  I’ve studied and read on this subject a lot, and I’ve found two categories of “failure”.

The first category of failure is the test that measures something that doesn’t correlate to overall performance in the real world.  Let’s say I’m interested in whether a glass is empty, full, or partially full of water – and I can’t just observe it.  Then I find out that I can get a test for “fluid amount in a glass”.  So I pay for the test and get a result – the glass is half full of fluid.  Do I assume that glasses are filled with water 90% of the time, and therefore there is a 90% chance that the glass is half-full of water?  90% of the time I’d be right.  That’s good, except for the person that gets the glass of “brake fluid” to drink 10% of the time. 

Soil tests are sometimes like that.  You’re measuring something, but it may or may not tie to improved performance in the plants that are in the soil.  I might measure Calcium in the soil and find that I have 1000 ppm of Calcium.  Great, right?  Well, maybe.  What if only 200 ppm of the Calcium is actually available to plants (including grass)?  A different story. 

The second category of failures is one in which innocent assumptions are made by scientists doing research – and the assumptions are flawed.  There is a famous example where scientists determined that the sap of most plants is between pH 4.5 and pH 5.0.  So the scientists recommended that foliar feeding be done and the pH adjusted chemically to pH 4.5 to pH 5.0, so that the foliar nutrient would be just at the right pH for the plant.  Very logical.

Except that all of the plants selected for the “what is the pH of sap” part of the research were from plants at farms of a mass-production agricultural corporation that just threw N-P-K on the soil and sold whatever came out from the plants.  The sap of those plants was pH 4.5 to pH 5.0.  The Brix values were horrible.

Later, when the results came out, the smaller-production farmers screamed that the pH value was very wrong.   The sap of healthy, properly-raised on good soil plants was between pH 6.0 and pH 7.0, and the Brix level many, many points higher.   Right where nature’s chemistry of everything else predicted it would be.  Did the University back off on the research conclusions?  No.  They said something about the need for the research at the mass-production level.  Did they put that in the report?  No.  So, we can still find that research today and we’ll adjust the pH for foliar feeding materials down to pH 4.5 – and have University research to prove it is correct.  The results of the research actually CAUSE problems because the standard is poorly-raised plants. 

In other words, we don’t test for excellence, we test to our expectations of mediocrity.

It is the sentence above that led me to begin questioning everything I had learned about testing, and started the reading of Albrecht and Reams to go back to the basics. 

It was the beginning of what I call the HELM method…

There is no way to understand the underpinnings of the HELM method without understanding the work of two people from the past.  In a way, they both were run out of town.  One was run out of the “town” of the scientific community, and the other was literally run out of the state of Georgia.

Let’s do this chronologically.  The person that I studied the most and credit with sheer brilliance is William Albrecht.   At a time just after World War II, the man looked at the new “religion” called “science can fix everything easily”.   He studied the science behind it all and declared it to be a false prophecy.  Despite the fact that he could back up his opinions that “food is fabricated soil fertility” with great science and an incredible set of observational skills, the accepted opinion of the day was that chemistry could supplement N-P-K, and that was all you needed.  Case closed, and don’t dare question it.  Albrecht questioned it, and accelerated his publication of data challenging it all.  Basically, he got banned from scientific symposiums, and others that came to his presentations were putting their careers in jeopardy.

Only a funny thing happened.  Albrecht got proven right.  On almost everything.  His work and his methods are considered top-drawer today.  But even more important than his science was his amazing ability to predict the future.  He predicted (and fought) the industrialization of food production.  He said that if you just focused on N-P-K, you would wind up with low-nutrition food that tasted like cardboard and that eventually you would reach soil collapse and people would have to supplement their diet artificially with vitamins and minerals.

The very same science declared that mother’s breast milk was inferior to the “infant formula” that science could make.  You know how that worked out.

Albrecht’s observations were ignored.  He wrote a paper about how when science said that cows should be fed corn instead of being put out to pastures to eat, the diseases that hit the cows were diet-related.  He studied farms.  He found a farm where the cows were literally eating the drywall in the barn.  Guess what?  The cows that ate the drywall didn’t get the diseases.  Drywall is high in Calcium (it’s Gypsum).  They started adding Calcium to the corn fed to the cows.  The disease stopped.

Want to understand why N-P-K fertilizers ultimately fail?  Read Albrecht’s papers.  There are three volumes (I think).

Then another man picked up on Albrecht’s work.  Dr. Carey Reams (a PHD doctor) came up with a bunch of tests that mimic nature better.   He also made sure that his tests correlated with observations made in nature (many “top tests” don’t).  Reams was also brilliant, but (in my opinion) got off into some pretty out-there theories of Biological Ionization and hoped to treat deadly diseases nutritionally.  Maybe he will turn out to be right someday, but he ran afoul of the medical community and literally was given a choice – leave Georgia permanently and never return or serve time in prison.  He left Georgia.  His theories have been extrapolated over the years since his death and seriously overstep what he really said.

I’m not a medical biochemist, so I never studied his human health stuff.  But his agronomist work is brilliant.  Find it and read it if you want a real eye-opener on the interactions of soil chemistry and soil biology.

This is not going to be a typical Blog.  While I may occasionally wander off to discussing the day-to-day wins and losses that are the Lawn-Crazy’s life, I have another story to tell.

You see, I’ve been holding-out or sandbagging about an experiment from three years ago that turned into a project ever since then.  An experiment and project that changed everything that I believe about methods for managing soil, and by extension, my lawn and plantings.  And it’s now entering the final set of tests (completion: November?).

It’s going to take me months to get to the point – there’s just so much that has to be told and understood about some of the core beliefs to just lay the Method out there and say “it works because it works”.

I’ll be right up-front and tell you that the method is not for the person that wants instant gratification.  And a tolerance for frustration is mandatory. When a month of work yields a measurable result of Zero, Zip, Nada, it’s really easy to blame the system instead of being glad that we didn’t continue down the failed path for a couple of years.  And if you’re a person that lives by reciting the oft-repeated-but-rarely-tested theories about soil, you’ll hate this Method – it is brutally cold in declaring failure even when all the stars were supposed to align for you because you followed the textbook to the “T”.

The method is called “HELM” and I’m not even going to explain what HELM means for quite a while, because if I did there would be a jump to conclusions about how it works.

If it sounds interesting to you, check this blog regularly.  If not, hey – skip this Blog and see you on the Forums!

And so, we begin…