Trees That Please Nursery

Soil Secrets LLC was created from our nursery business Trees That Please back in the 1990's.  It's purpose was to continue the R & D of products that could be effective in restoring the natural balance of soil concerning what defines a healthy soil.  The other objective was to use these same products for growing our hundreds of thousands of trees at Trees That Please, growing trees with the natural processes of Nature flourishing on the roots of our product.  While fertilizers grow drug addicts addicted to the constant feed of the fertilizer, our Soil Secrets process will grow plants that are ready for the rigors of Nature.   For a long time nursery people used balanced N-P-K fertilizers with names that implied they would improve the texture of soil, or they sold bulk amounts of compost, mushroom compost, peat moss and products called Soil Builder, in the attempt to change the Soil Organic Matter and bulk density characteristics of a soil, somehow...

The Arboretum  Tomé property was purchased in 1985 by Michael & Kari Melendrez as vacant land.  Unknown to the Melendrez couple the soil was a high pH Saline Sodic Alkaline clay with the pH running as high as 9.3 and never below 8.5.   In the winter the salts would come to the surface and turn the ground white.  In horticulture terms this situation is called "White Death" as very few of the most hardy weeds can tolerate those conditions.   Michael showed a soil analysis report of the site to a Professor of Soil Science at New Mexico State University who told him it was impossible to fix that kind of soil and to put a for sale sign on it.   Instead Michael using his knowledge of chemistry, molecular biology, microbiology and a good deal of dumb luck began to experiment with methods of soil  restoration.  The clay on the site is about 12 feet deep and was hard as a rock, taking many days of digging with a concrete buster and pick ...

Soil Secrets -  Biomimetic Soil Ecology - "To Copy What is Life Like" Category of Product:  Pre-Biotic -  A  substances that stimulates the growth or activity of microorganisms (e.g., bacteria and fungi) by creating or supporting a favorable environment.    In this case the environment is soil and the  area close to the plant roots called the  rhizosphere.     1.  TerraPro  -  Tested and Measured doing a molecular characterization down to a sub-atomic level,  under a Commercial Proprietary Information Contract by Los Alamos National Labs with Sandia National Laboratories,   TerraPro  is a carbon rich Macro-Molecular Substance (huge molecules clustered together into Supramolecular groups).  Supramolecular just means that the molecules are highly energized and they self assembled into larger structures where the molecules are not chemically bonded to each other.  In ...

By Michael Martin Melendrez, Founder and Managing Member -  Soil Secrets LLC It's common knowledge that the idea of increasing the amount of soil organic matter is generally a good idea.   Its an even better idea if you live in a place on the globe where soils never truly developed a defined zone of topsoil that one can see with the naked eye.  Where I live in the arid Southwestern Chihuahuan Desert the only place we can truly see carbon rich topsoil is where lots of natural vegetation was able to grow over many hundreds of years, depositing organic debris and growing lots of roots that finally decay and contribute to this accumulation of decaying organic matter.   An example of this might be along a creek or river where riparian vegetation is getting enough water.   It's also commonly accepted that soil organic matter (som) increases the soils potential for holding onto water, where its been said that for every 1 percent of increase in soil organi...

I've been reading up on new ways to access changes in soil concerning the Soil's Biota (the microbes),  who they are and what diversity there is. I've found a bunch of published writings on using phospholipid fatty acid (known as PLFA) as a method of measuring this factor.   Microbial components are expressed as content of phospholipid fatty acid markers specific for each component.   I've attached one article that used this method in measuring the microbial community structure on various sites including one treated with biochar.   Since many of you continue to ask me about biochar this grabbed my attention.  The study found that the site treated with biochar tested out pretty good, so I decided to look at this closer and when I did I found that the amount of biochar used per sq. ft. was 3.5 pounds, 152,460 pounds per acre.   Holly Smolly, can you image using that much TerraPro, how fantastic the results would be? I've attached the paper so you can re...

Here's additional information on how well TerraPro's organic chemistry benefits agriculture by using vegetation analysis with infrared. These are almond orchards in California. You can easily see that the fields treated with TerraPro have more leaf cover and are needing less water because the soil and biomass temperatures are lower. At our own arboretum in Los Lunas the soil temperatures are 16 degrees cooler than other sites in Valencia County at the same time. The lawn images are one year apart in Merced California.