aroundtheyard.com Forums

Lately I've been trying to "broaden my horizons" on lawn care products with the goal of developing an annual lawn care regimen, and I came across these products on Amazon. Take Amazon reviews for what their worth, but people seem to swear by them, and yet I've not heard much about them here, the place I come to most, so I'd like to get ATY's take on them. Thanks.

Can we assume that you've already read the hundreds of past posts on worm castings and Azomite (and rock dust)?

TimmyG wrote: ↑

July 15th, 2017, 10:55 am

Can we assume that you've already read the hundreds of past posts on worm castings and Azomite (and rock dust)?

No

Then you have a great place to start then...

I bought some myocorrhizae inoculants from a respected garden shop in San Antonio a few years ago. Management had changed although many of the same people were still there. These people have done some research and found that mycorrhizal fungi are extremely important to the health of many plants. My instinct was that the necessary fungi already existed in the soil, but the owner's wife seemed so confident that I needed the inoculant to cure my lawn issue that I bought some. I used it and nothing changed. Looking at the area where I used it in subsequent Google Earth imagery, there is no difference in that spot than the rest of the lawn. Anyway I'm back to my belief that all the necessary microbes are already in your soil and that special inoculants are unnecessary.

Worm castings are valuable to but so is compost. They are valuable in restoring a soil that has had some chemical or neglect damage.

Instead of azomite, get your soil tested and correct the chemistry before you spend money on magic dust and sand. Yes this is the organic forum, but the microbes in the soil need to have a good mineral and chemical environment to really thrive. In order to correct the chemistry, you will need chemicals. These are not fertilizers but they might be micro nutrients essential to the life and health of the plants growing there. Then once you know what chemistry needs to change, you can ponder how the chemistry of azomite can contribute to the perfection of that chemistry.

+1. Many folks want to "be organic" right from the start, but the lower density of the purely organic stuff (in many cases) causes folks to give up on improving the lawn/garden because the results are slower. A remediation program with denser materials followed by a migration to organics is often much faster and (more importantly!) provides feedback that the efforts are rewarded. I've used Azomite and believe in it, but I'd focus on a glaring Phosphorus/Potassium/Calcium gap before playing with Azomite.