Last drop of organics today, 6 bags of Milorganite. For the season I put down 67 of them for 2,412 lbs.

My final organic total for the year EXCLUSIVE of leaves and whatever annual/perennials stems I chop up comes in 9,375 lbs on 5,200 sq. ft. (give or take depending on how far over I go onto my neighbor's property). That's 1.8 lbs/sq. ft. or 1,802.79 lbs/thousand.

Probably have about 1,000 lbs of compost that I used on my front hill to help the dead grass break down faster. The rest was sawdust pellets (which worked great after I ran them through my chipper), alfalfa pellets and soybean and corn meal (and 200 lbs of corn flour I bought by accident which I'll never do again).

Yep, done here as well,except for a few more mows and a winterizer drop near the end of the month.Lawn still a wonderful green color and growing about an inch per week,despite the 3-4 nights of frost and October snow.

Enough to raise soil iron 200 PPM. Minus what fixes up, leaches out, and so on. Not bad.

My drop is also done at just under 300 pounds per thousand this year excluding any leaves.

My soil test from April showed an iron level between 315 and 385 at 6 inches and about 100 parts higher at 2-3 inches. I put down quite a bit of Encap iron as well, so if I could net a 150 point increase I'd be very excited. I was about 100 ppm 3-4 years ago.

Yeah, I'm pushing mine along, too. All things considered, I just hit 19.75 pounds of iron per thousand, and I'll just about reach 20 as the season shuts down--the same amount of iron in 500 per K of Milorganite. That should shove me along another 60 PPM or so, well into the three hundred range.

MorpheusPA wrote:Yeah, I'm pushing mine along, too. All things considered, I just hit 19.75 pounds of iron per thousand, and I'll just about reach 20 as the season shuts down--the same amount of iron in 500 per K of Milorganite. That should shove me along another 60 PPM or so, well into the three hundred range.

Optimum is around 500 or so, right? Or us it higher?

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Hard to say, really. Assuming otherwise good balances in the soil and pH in the perfect range, 400 to 500 should produce really good color.

High levels of phosphorus will require a corresponding rise in iron, but it's not going to be a one to one ratio.

So far, rising from about 100 to 250 has seriously improved color. I can tell soil iron's up, but not as far as I'd like, so I'm awaiting next spring's test to tell me what's up. Color in the gardens is extremely impressive and doesn't need any more iron pushing there.

My guess is that I'll be changing my 400 to 500 range upward when I get there, at least for me. Most people would probably be perfectly happy at 300 or even 200.