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Soil Tests

I’m sure there must be a lab around somewhere I can send a soil sample to for analysis, but I don’t know one off hand. For the time being, I decided to try buying a soil testing kit and testing my garden soil myself.

I finally got around to trying out my soil testing kit today:

Soil Testing Kit and Soil Sample

Just by looking at my soil sample I can see it is very sandy.  It also contains a lot of silt because when wet it is very sloppy. The canals surrounding my garden also have a lot of silt in them.  The sample appears very low in organic material. The instructions say the soil must be completely dry before testing it, and the sample above has been sitting around for a few days now.

The instructions advise doing several tests from different locations and averaging the results. For now I am just testing the one sample, but I will take more samples over time especially as I suspect problems in different parts of the garden and want to investigate further.

I suspect the previous gardener was not very sophisticated, and probably added different fertilizers and other amendments to different parts of the garden. I also saw he was growing beans in a few places, perhaps making parts of the garden higher in nitrogen than others. Unless I think there is a very obvious or urgent problem, I’m going to wait before adding anything until I have had a chance to think about it and see how things grow.

While this soil sample was taken from a part of the garden I hadn’t added anything to yet, I’ve added compost to most parts of the garden now, so if there are any nutrient problems, I have probably reduced them.

The contents of the kit looks like this:

Testing Kit Contents

There are several bottles of liquids and vials of powders, together with some empty vials, a plunger assembly, filters and o-rings for the plunger, a few scoops and some instructions with color charts to look up results.

The kit does four soil related tests: Acidity (Ph), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K).

Except for the Ph test, where the soil is mixed directly together with the color changing chemical, all of the test have two parts. The first part involves mixing the soil together with an extractant solution, then passing it through a filter in the plunger assembly to remove the soil. The color changing chemical is then mixed separately with the extractant solution and compared to the provided charts.

Sorry this picture didn’t come out well, but this is the Ph test:

Ph Test

From this test I can see the soil Ph is 7.5, all the way at the far end of the test. Since the test only goes up to 7.5, and this is also my reading, it’s possible my soil is even more alkaline than that. This result conflicts with another Ph test I did a few months ago, which gave a result of 6.5.

This tells me I need to investigate this further. Perhaps there is a problem with one or both of the tests I used, or perhaps the Ph is very different in different parts in my garden.

It’s possible I have a bit of a Ph problem to deal with in the garden.

The N test:

Nitrogen Test

In my opinion, the results of this test lie somewhere between ‘Medium to Low’ and ‘Low’.

At least in this part of the garden, I need more N.

The P test:

P Test

I think the results of this test are somewhere between ‘High to Medium’ and ‘Medium’, closer to the former.

At least in this part of the garden, I don’t need any more P.

K test:

For this test, I don’t have a clear picture of the results. In fact the results were very hard to read, and I don’t have much confidence in them. Perhaps after I do the test a few more times I will learn better how to read the results.

The scale looks like this:

K Test Scale

The test is supposed to result in cloudiness that you can compare to these pictures, but the result I got was almost totally clear. I repeated the test, and the second time I got a little cloudiness for a brief moment, perhaps close to the ‘Medium’ indication here, but it was really hard to know if this was right.

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Our Legacy as Consumers

It’s been in the news here. The world’s oceans are full of plastic, and the problem is growing. Scientists are just starting to realize how big this problem really is.

Plastic is not biodegradable and doesn’t break down in the environment, all it does is break apart into smaller and smaller pieces, so called ‘Mermaid’s Tears’. Sand nearly everywhere in the world has been found to contain particles of plastic. These particles are eaten by marine animals and enter the food chain.

Kate just posted on the plastic soup floating in the Pacific Ocean that continues to grow. Some of this is consumer waste, but a lot of it is intentional or accidental dumping by the manufacturers or shipping companies. After all, when the Exxon Valdez sank it was big news, but when is the last time you heard of a cargo ship losing it’s load of plastic?

We all know when we buy something it has to be disposed of eventually, using landfill space or polluting the environment.

What about the other legacies?

I recently came across a series of websites or people’s Flickr accounts giving information and pictures about abandoned buildings or other structures. Apparently there’s a real following of people for this kind of thing. One that I found most interesting was the Dixie Square shopping mall in Harvey, Illinois, about a 25 minute drive from Chicago, abandoned in 1978 and still standing. This is the mall where the Blues Brothers movie was filmed.

The mall is standing there empty because there’s no money to tear it down, and no one wants to reuse the site for anything else. The empty mall now sits in the middle of an economically depressed area.

This isn’t the only abandoned mall! Here’s a website that tracks abandoned malls and bankrupt retailers. The Dixie Square mall is a little unusual, because most abandoned sites get demolished or refurbished and used for something else, usually bigger and better. What happens when they day comes when the economy can’t support building something bigger and better? Just what exactly is going to happen to all of these big box stores when big boxes aren’t needed anymore? Will something bigger and better take their place? Will we be able to continue expanding our economies at this rate after Peak Oil? Will we find some other way to ‘recycle’ this infrastructure?

Malls aren’t the only thing abandoned. Other sites include this amusement park (also here), London’s abandoned tube stations or numerous places in the former USSR.

Of course there are any number of scenarios for the future, not all of them bad, but seeing pictures of all of this abandoned infrastructure has really made me think about some of them.

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Tomato Trench Planting Method

I recently did a couple of posts about starting tomatoes in a tray, then transplanting the seedlings deep into a pot.

Tomatoes are one of the few plants that benefit from being transplanted deeply, because they can grow new roots from the part of the plant buried. If possible it’s good to transplant tomato seedlings a couple of times in the course of moving them out to the garden.

Marc of Garden Desk just made a post that goes along with this idea nicely, about planting tomatoes with the trench method.

I mentioned before that since tomatoes are one of the few plants that can develop roots along a buried stem, that other vegetable plants should be buried to about the same level when transplanting. Mostly this is true. It’s come up in discussion recently that if you have a leggy seedling of almost any vegetable variety, that planting deep can help with the legginess. This can be a reason to plant a non-tomato plant seedling deep. Just be reasonable, and keep in mind that some plants may not like being planted too deep.