Topic: regarding lime

[Jeannine]

I need the mystery taken out of lime..

This is what I know..4 types but  2 don't get used in the garden..I am OK so far.

Then I read should be used in  he fall...but Tee Gee puts it round brassicas in a grid.

Have read some breaks down quick, some takes months and this is where I get confused


I presume there is a couple of types I can use.. and I think it comes from a couple of sources.

Some are just calcium , others are calcium and magnesium

Some are water soluble, some are pellets.

Some break down fast, some take a while.

So can some one explain what I should use to lime my garden IF it needs it and is there two things I should buy..eg a slow acting one and a faster one...or an over winter one and an"as you plant" one.

Really confused on this one now as what I used to buy is no longer here. With that  I  rotated beds and crops and limed one area per year only, so everything got lime about every 4 years or so, but I bought it by brand name which I can't find and if I ask I am then asked to say what type of lime I want .Aah!

Help

XX Jeannine

[davyw1]

Jeannine you are confused, never though i would see the day

I think this is pretty hard to explain, but if you look here i think its about the most basic and the easiest to understand
It really come down to knowing your soil, for example i only need to lime (apart from my onion bed) every three year as our allotments are above chalk. When i do lime i use Vitax Garden Lime Soil Conditioner.
hope this takes away your confusion cos its a terrible thing to have and hope you recover soon

http://www.allotment.org.uk/fertilizer/garden-lime.php

[Jeannine]

Cheeky Monkey..just for the record I also know diddly about peas, brassicas, onions . My unconfusion stops at squash, corn, beans, tomatoes amd a few others.

I am trying to educate myself a little..

LOL I have this one in my faves but still don't know about in the autumn or round the cabbages

XX Jeannine

[davyw1]

TEE GEE has been gardening for a long time and knows his soil requirement and his method works for him, he will know just the right amount to apply and when so it does not interact with any fertilizer he uses.

Liming in the autumn ( that's Fall to you LOL) is so the lime is washed down into your soil so if you put fertilizer on just before planting out in the spring they wont react against each other.

Hope this helps unconfused you

[Tee Gee]

I need the mystery taken out of lime..

This is what I know..4 types but  2 don't get used in the garden..I am OK so far.

Weeeeeeell nearly! ::)

Basically there is only ONE  ;)

See here;

http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Data/Lime/Lime.htm

Then I read should be used in  he fall...but Tee Gee puts it round brassicas in a grid.

 what I should use to lime my garden IF it needs it and is there two things I should buy..eg a slow acting one and a faster one...or an over winter one and an"as you plant" one.

 everything got lime about every 4 years or so,

As Dave mentioned knowing your soil helps!

The main thing to remember is; NEVER apply Lime and Manure at the same time.

See note in here; http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Data/Soil-Liming/Soil-Liming.htm

Regarding time of application it can be an either or situation i.e. spring or Autumn (Fall)

You mention I do mine at planting out time whereas my website says autumn (for the reasons given)

This is for a few reasons and they are;

I prefer to get my manure in prior to winter so that the winter weather can act on it!

Sometimes my manure is not fully rotted when I apply it so I find it is rendered down by bacteria and worms by the time planting time comes around!

Then by applying my lime at planting out time I like to think of it in this way;

1) There is no reaction with the manure!

2) My soil is quite light so autumn applied lime is not leeched out, it is there where I need it from the outset.

3) This is a personal view and I have no proof but by laying it on the surface in a grid like I do I find the slugs do not cross it meanng I don't have to resort to slug pellets.

I feel the type of lime I use here also helps this process and that is; I use 'Hydrated lime' as opposed to say crushed limestone.

Either of these products would look after the pH aspect of my soil but what I think happens is; the hydrated lime 'slakes' the lime, this heats it up and this is why the slugs & snails will not cross it.

As I say it is only my opinion, but more importantly " it seems to work"

4) Again it is only a personal view but I believe that another benefit from laying it on the surface is there is no likely hood of the tender young root system coming in contact with pockets of lime which might burn them.

I also like to think that the lime/rain mixture percolates through the soil and when the plants come in contact with the lime, it is well diluted.

5) Placing only round my brassicas ensures that my liming programme fits in with my 'rotation' programme. Add to this that my brassicas usually follow my potatoes I ensure that their is very little lime in the soil by the time I get round to planting potatoes there again (Potatoes do not like lime)

TEE GEE has been gardening for a long time

and don't I know it! :P

I noticed someone wrote the other day that an old lad in his seventies works two plots on their site!

Snap!!

and knows his soil requirement and his method works for him, he will know just the right amount to apply and when so it does not interact with any fertilizer he uses.

Thanks for those few kind words Dave! ;)

Oddly enough Dave I never weigh/calculate how much I put on!

I think this goes back to many years ago when I was a 'novice' I used to weigh/ measure everything but soon got to recognise for instance; what 2oz or 4oz per sq yard looked like so if it looks right now 'it is right' as far as I am concerned.

I think some people 'coddle' there plants too much these days but thats another story! 8)

However I have got to disagree with you slightly here when you say;

Liming in the autumn ( that's Fall to you LOL) is so the lime is washed down into your soil so if you put fertilizer on just before planting out in the spring they wont react against each other.

The reaction you mention happens with manure not fertilser!

In fact I think you will find that quite a few fertilisers already have lime in them e.g. Growmore, Fish Blood & Bone (There is calciumin the bone) so adding more is not going to react with them I would have thought ???

The only exclusion I can think to this is 'ericaceous' fertilisers.

Note; By luck rather than good guidance and because I dug in my manure in last autumn,my situation this season with the aminoproplyd situation is a lot less than it might have been, that is; only stuff manured this spring is affected, those in manure placed last autumn are free of the problem.

So again my methods have paid off for me (well at least in part)

Hope this helps unconfused you

Or have I confused you more? ;D


Let me give you my philosophy on gardening;

There are no bad gardeners only better gardeners and if you find a way that works for your stick with it!

At least until you find a better way!

Don't be frightened to try something that the 'pundits' say you shouldn't!

But a word of warning don't put all your eggs in the one basket when doing this.

By all means try out  your idea but back it up with a tried and tested method so that your season isn't a complete failure!

Finally;  give up gardening when it becomes a chore! gardening should be a leisurely pursuit!

[Unwashed]

An O-level in chemistry tells me enough to know that soil chemistry is a vast and complicated business.

The confusion over the terminology isn't too difficult to straighten out.

Limestone is mostly calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), and crushed limestone is garden lime.  Chalk is a kind of limestone.

When a gardener limes the soil she's mostly spreading some form of calcium carbonate mineral, so maybe crushed limestone or chalk, or maybe marl which is like a muddy chalk.  The object of the exercise is both to provide Calcium, and to lower the pH, and the soil microbes and rain weather the calcium carbonate slowly into soluable Ca⁺ and OH^-.

But farmers might also lime their fields with slaked lime which is calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)₂) and so miss out the need for the slow weathering process, but the downside is the calcium hydroxide will leach out quite quickly and it's quite a caustic chemical.

Slaked lime is made by wetting calcium oxide, or quick lime, which is made by burning limestone in a lime kiln.

Garden lime, quick lime, and slaked lime might all be called lime by different people depending on their interest, like builders using lime putty are talking about slaked lime.

It's the soil chemistry that is really fascinating though and I know pretty much nothing about that, which is a shame really, because it's a complicated interaction between minerals, microbes, and weather, and correcting deficiencies is rarely as simple as bunging on a load of what you're short of.  So whether liming is the answer depends a lot on the soil and not just the pH.

[Jeannine]

Thanks tee gee,so if I have this right, you don't lime in the fall..ok I understand why,

You lime only your brassicas .

You use the grid, which seems quite alot if lime when I look.

You use hydrated lime.

I think I understand what you are saying. I need to go off line and look up what is available to me,  other than Dolomite below.

What is Dolomite lime? This is what seems to be available to me in seed catalogues,it is a mix of magnesium sulphate and calcium phosphate in granular form, but it says to spread it 3 weeks before planting. I guess that is if you work it into the soil.

Isn't Calcium Carbonate just chalk, we used to put our OES feet in bags of that to whiten them when we were showing them, that has to be pretty harmless.                      


I will be back...

XX Jeannine

OK, can't use Hydrated lime, it is not considered organic so we are not allowed to use it.

Oh eck.everybody here tellsme I should use lime as the soil needs it, nobody seem to know what I should buy, they just say lime at the garden centre.

You know I hate it when I can't get my head around things. So I guess armed with your info I shall cruise the garden centre.

Thanls Tee gee.

XX Jeannine
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

[lincsyokel2]

I cant see why hydrated lime isnt organic!! Its limestone thats been heated up in a kiln to 825 °C, cooled and then slaked with water.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Dolomite is a form of limestone which contains magnesium carbonate along with the normal calcium carbonate.

[davyw1]

However I have got to disagree with you slightly here when you say;

Quote
Liming in the autumn ( that's Fall to you LOL) is so the lime is washed down into your soil so if you put fertilizer on just before planting out in the spring they wont react against each other.

I have no idea as to why i said that, i must have caught this confused thing.
On saying that its what i have been doing over the past couple of years due to a large load of contaminated manure.

As our allotments are on chalk i don,t have the need to lime every year apart from my onion bed so as i am not digging in any manure in Autumn i am giving it a light dust of lime in the autumn then about a month before planting my onions i am raking in concentrated manure, Grow Organic 6X. and i am finding it works quite well. I have noted there is no change in the growth of my brasica,s but my leeks are not as large as i would have liked but i put this down to trying to judge the amount to put into my trenches.

[Kepouros]

I would just like to add a word of caution about the link given by davyw1 on the matter of soil pH in general, and in particular the statement that annual manuring will lower the pH, requiring corrective liming.  It is true that manure, being acidic, will result in a lowering of the soil pH, but this is of a purely temporary nature, and the pH level will then slowly rise again and within a year will almost certainly have reached its former level.

Every soil has its own basic pH level, and whatever is done to it to alter that level it will still return to that level of its own volition as quickly as possible.   Anyone who grows (or tries to grow) rhododendrons on an alkaline soil will know the truth of this - whatever is added to the soil to lower the pH is quickly nullified and the pH simply returns quickly to its normal level.

The principle was proved some years ago in Canadian experiments wich confirmed that the yearly addition of highly acidic leafmould for 5 years left the soil with exactly the same pH level as that at the start of the experiments, and the principle will apply in the same way whether the additive be leafmould, manure, sulphate of ammonia, sulphur or whatever.

On the same basis, of course, the effect of lime is equally temporary - as soon as the chemical reaction between the soil acids and the lime has fully taken place the pH will return to its previous level.

[lincsyokel2]

Dolomite is a form of limestone which contains magnesium carbonate along with the normal calcium carbonate.

Indeed. Dolomite lime is added to professional peat based growing media to correct the acidity of the peat, usually at a rate of about 4 kg per cubic metre.