On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:08:27 -0500, (Joe Doe)
wrote:

In article , Tom Jaszewski
wrote:

On 12 Jun 2003 14:24:59 GMT, (Marley1372) wrote:

Personally, I
just think gypsum is a bunch of crap.


It's a good thing sustainable farmers don't share your opinion!!!

Gypsum is mainly helpful in sodic soils and is generally misapplied to
all clay soils. They help sodic soils because the calcium displaces
sodium which allows clay particles to flocculate and thus improve
drainage. In soils that are already high in calcium this obviously cannot
occur and so is indeed a waste.

See:
http://www.wtamu.edu/~crobinson/DrDirt/gypsum.html

http://turfgrass.hort.iastate.edu/extension/gypsum.pdf

Roland


Nice to see you again Roland, but I'm afraid there's more to this
story than Iowa turfgrass and Dr Dirt's perennial.

As always the sensible course is to have a Morgan extraction done and
determine what nutrients are PLANT available.

I would agree that more important than adding gypsum, where soil
testing indicates, is the addition of carbon sources and building a
soil biology.