I had held onto it as collateral, but hadn't sent it to a lab yet because I was waiting for Kellogg/Master Nursery's results. So I paid for a lab test myself. Well what I hadn't told them up to that point was that I had actually taken an extra sample of their tainted product and saved it. I saved exactly as much as I knew was required by the soil lab I normally use. The people at Kellogg said that I hadn't saved enough of a sample. Then finally, they contacted me to say they never tested the soil and weren't going to.
Well, for a while I heard nothing, so I pestered them. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt because they were being very nice. I gave a sample of the soil and the sample of the trash to the Master Nursery people to help them figure out what happened, and they promised they would test the sample to make sure there was no really toxic contaminant and send me the results. I had saved a couple samples of the last bag of garbage humus in my wheelbarrow, as well as picked out some of the choicer bits of trash from the bag (fabric, electrical wire, plastic, plastic, more plastic, painted wood chips, etc.). While I appreciated the gesture, that didn't really help the fact that I'd already mixed four bags of the garbage humus into my vegetable plots. To their credit, they were very nice about the incident on the phone. They said the product is processed at the Kellogg plant, and they were going to contact them, and get to the bottom of this situation. Then they gave me five more bags of the same product to replace the tainted batch I got. I called the Master Nursery company several times.
I do not need to be adding garbage and paying for the privilege. Well, let's just say I was not going to let this one slide. I am a freak about keeping my vegetable garden organic and clean. I was HORRIFIED to find that the trash was actually coming from the bagged soil that I had purchased!!! This was NOT the forest humus that was promised on the label! Or if it was forest humus, it was from a forest growing on a landfill/e-waste facility. After I was almost done with my amending, I started to get a little suspicious and decided to pour out some of the planting mix into an empty wheelbarrow. Junk like little bits of cloth, some wire, plastic film, hard plastic, chunks of painted wood, etc. Since I live in an urban area, I first assumed that this trash was stuff already in my yard that I was digging up, but there was just so much more trash than I was used to seeing. I started mixing in the stuff when I began noticing lots of junk in my veggie beds. Well I bought 5 giant bags of Master Nursery Bumper Crop and brought it home. No biggie, I just decided to also buy some planting mix from my regular nursery. My compost bin is pretty small so I didn't have enough homemade stuff to work into all my veggie beds. One of the common recommendations to prevent nematodes is to mix in more organic matter. I had some problems with root knot nematodes this past summer (you may recall this topic in a previous post). In October, I was refreshing my vegetable beds. I did notice there was quite a lot of not-fully-decomposed wood particles, but again, I didn't sweat it. Occasionally I'd noticed the odd piece of plastic pot mixed in with the bag, but I never questioned the overall quality of the product. I've been buying Master Nursery products for a while. Where do I begin this epic saga of contaminated bagged soil and out of pocket soil testing costs? But I've gotten the results, and I have to say, Master Nursery brand's Bumper Crop Soil Builder is just not a product I will ever use again. In fact, I'd been holding out on posting this because I wanted to first have a lab test the product. I hate that my first review of a product has to be negative.
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