TomatoTone + ? or Should I DIY?

[feldon30]

Last year was my first year gardening in the Carolinas, first time trying to grow anything in heavy red clay, and first time not using raised beds. In my 30x10 plot, a company came out and tilled the clay (and blew a hydraulic hose when they tried to dig deeper than 3 inches).

I added a few cubic yards of a garden mix. Then I added about 200 lbs of Black Kow, 100 lbs of Mushroom Compost, 3 large bags of Promix, 150 lb of Rabbit Manure (fresh). For each tomato plant, I added about 1/2 cup of TomatoTone, 1/4 cup of Happy Frog, and a little bit of dolomitic lime.

Believe it or not, with all of that, the plants did not put on any significant size and productivity on the plants I'd started was pretty low. Also, all of my heart/paste varieties exhibited extreme amounts of BER and even some of the Cherokee Purples had it. Strangely, plants I bought from Bonnie's (ugh) of Cherokee Purple and Big Beef produced very well (20-40 fruit per plant).

In November, I drove around the neighborhood and collected 10 cubic yards of mostly oak leaves. We ran them through a Troy-Bilt shredder and I have about 6" of them sitting on my plot. I am co-gardening with a friend who owns the property so the rest of the leaves went over his 40x30 area.

FInally, my gardening partner-in-crime and I have found a fellow that has 19 alpaca. We already added some aged alpaca manure to our plots but this year we'll be getting a shovel full or two.

So with all this said, I know I need to add substantial amounts of dolomitic lime to the soil to get the pH under control and increase calcium availability. But what about fertilizer?

I was a diehard TomatoTone fan before the reformulation. Is it still worth using some of it due to the micronutrients? I know there have been a lot of threads and Rnewste has done a lot of testing of the old vs. new. Should I just buy bags of bone meal, blood meal, etc. and make my own fert? Is there a product or products worth buying and mixing together? I don't mind spending some money if the results speak for themselves.