Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

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MFJones
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Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MFJones » June 6th, 2017, 11:38 am


New poster here but I've been reading for quite some time now & love all the good information. I'm posting b/c I finally committed & purchased all the ingredients for the BL Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner. I received the remainder of the ingredients yesterday & proceeded to follow the instructions, mixing...

Kelp Help:
-8oz of HA powder with 1 gallon of water
-4oz of Kelp powder/chunks(?) with 1 gallon of water
(Combined to yield 2 gallons of Kelp Help)

Soil Conditioner:
-80 ounces of SLS + 40 ounces of water + 8oz of Yucca
(1 gallon of soil conditioner)

After mixing I noticed all mixtures were dark, especially the HA & Kelp which appeared almost black (which from reading on here, is completely normal). My concern is with the Soil Conditioner, I watched a YouTube video showing a guy mixing his own batch from the recipe that he claims to have gotten from this site as well & it appeared fairly light in color, almost like a yellow/beige color (color you'd expect from watered down Yucca). Mine, however, is a dark brown, not nearly as dark as the Kelp Help but it's MUCH darker then the mixture he made. So I'm curious, should the conditioner be lighter in color, as his was or is the darker brown that my mix produced normal?

Thanks in advance & my apologies for another KH/SC post :D

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MorpheusPA
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MorpheusPA » June 6th, 2017, 12:55 pm

It's going to depend on your yucca extract! Mine was very dark brown, giving me something that ended up looking like light molasses by the time I was done.

I've since changed the recipe a bit, and use 5 oz of SLS powder (and I dropped the yucca from my personal mix, but that's not really here or there).

Regardless, on most natural products, color variance is normal and you sound like your mix is well within normal range.

lVlrBoJang1es
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by lVlrBoJang1es » June 7th, 2017, 7:59 am

MorpheusPA wrote:
June 6th, 2017, 12:55 pm
It's going to depend on your yucca extract! Mine was very dark brown, giving me something that ended up looking like light molasses by the time I was done.
Are you just referring to the color? I was a bit shocked when mine was literally the consistency of petroleum jelly.

Once I added a 10 Oz glob to the filter basket in my back pack sprayer, i had to literally add one cup of water at a time accompanied by vigorous stirring with a rubber spatula. I repeated this process for about 20 minutes straight until there was about 3 gallons of water in the sprayer tank before MOST of the material made its way through the filter basket.

Does this sound normal?

MFJones
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MFJones » June 7th, 2017, 10:53 am

MorpheusPA wrote:
June 6th, 2017, 12:55 pm
It's going to depend on your yucca extract! Mine was very dark brown, giving me something that ended up looking like light molasses by the time I was done.
Thanks a lot Morpheus, that's EXACTLY what mine resembles, a light molasses color. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't screwing up on my mix & causing it to be too concentrated.

Sprayed it the whole shabang on the lawn yesterday evening, looking forward to seeing the results. Prior to this I used LazyMan Soil Doctor for 2-3 applications & was pleasantly surprised at the improvement it made to my lawn over the course of those 3 applications...I was applying it every 2 weeks (which is also my plan for the BL Soil Conditioner & Kelp Help + H), so price wise, I should end up saving a good bit of money. I'm curious though, do you think the improvement to the overall appearance of my lawn was mostly due to the fertilizer added in the Soil Doctor mix or should I expect the same/similar results from the Best Lawn formulas as well?

MFJones
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MFJones » June 7th, 2017, 11:10 am

lVlrBoJang1es wrote:
June 7th, 2017, 7:59 am
Are you just referring to the color? I was a bit shocked when mine was literally the consistency of petroleum jelly.
...
Does this sound normal?
Like you, I'm obviously not experienced with these formulas either but I'm almost certain that, once mixed, it shouldn't be the consistency of petroleum jelly...if so, I screwed up big time, lol. The consistency of my final soil conditioner mixture was more like watery sugar free log cabin syrup (best comparison I can come up with at the moment).

Maybe you're just using a highly concentrated SLS, SLES, etc.,? If so then the ratios for your recipe would need to be adjusted accordingly so you use less SLS & more water? Just guessing here, I'm sure the pros will chime in soon enough.


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MorpheusPA
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MorpheusPA » June 7th, 2017, 12:51 pm

I once used too much SLS powder and ended up with sodium laureth slop-ate. It was less petroleum jelly consistency than kind of half-solid. :-)

If that was the cause, just dilute it and no harm done. I used it at one-third rate with extra water and it all worked out fine. It was probably of slightly different levels of effectiveness, but I didn't care.

If it stiffened up because of--for example--decaying yucca, again, dilute it. The effectiveness will drop, but it won't hurt anything. If you ended up with yucca chunks (I did once), sieve it out. That was when I stopped using the yucca...

lVlrBoJang1es
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by lVlrBoJang1es » June 7th, 2017, 1:51 pm

Hmmmm...

Thanks Morph.

I looked at the EBay item description for the SLES I used just now and noticed it was "Roughly 60% concentration". I of course used 80 Oz as the article calls for.

I didn't notice any negative affects of my first application aside from the lawn feeling quite slippery, although intuition would tell me that's entirely normal. The soil did feel a bit softer on my last mow (5 days later?). Maybe that's just placebo if it's too early to really make any difference...

I'll mix some water into the BLSC bucket until it's syrupy. I'm scared that continuous applications in this consistency may wreak havoc on the lifeforms in my soil that i've been working so hard to cultivate.

This also wreaks havoc on my "follow the directions to a t" nature...

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MorpheusPA
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by MorpheusPA » June 7th, 2017, 4:49 pm

Soap, at modest concentrations, does nothing negative to the soil life. At high concentrations, it's a great way of getting rid of aphids without harming other insects. :-)

With a lot of this stuff "follow directions to a T" is a difficult determination. If you follow me around, it's a gloop* of this and a dribble of that and that's close enough. When I say 4 ounces per thousand square feet for most organic sprays, it means "well, 2 to 6 is fine and I really do try to get close to 4. Ish. Appropriately. Whatever."

* A gloop is what you get when you tilt the container and let it run into the bucket until it sucks air and makes the "gloop" sound.

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andy10917
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by andy10917 » June 7th, 2017, 10:30 pm

I am much more careful about my measurements than Morph is. At least in waning periods of the moon. In non-leap-years. I mean 1.21 gloops is 1.21 gloops and not 1.20 or 1.22 gloops. Get your Milorganite together, Morph!

lVlrBoJang1es
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Re: Yet another Kelp Help & Soil Conditioner Question...

Post by lVlrBoJang1es » June 8th, 2017, 7:10 am

Hehe - as always; thanks guys!

Sorry for the thread hi-jacking. I thought my question was relevant enough to the original topic to avoid starting another.

I've been telling myself for years that my life would be MUCH less stressful if i could live more by "whatever"s and "Ish"s - now i'll add "gloop"s to the hakuna matata ideal my anally detail oriented brain will never achieve :shock:

:rotfl:

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