Almost everyone recommends getting a soil test, including most gardening web sites, USA extension offices and gardening experts. I disagree!
There are good reasons for getting a soil test, but the general advice of getting regular soil tests for homeowners does not make sense. Here’s why.
Have you ever wondered how healthy your soil is? There are three ways to get a handle on this question. Grow lots of different plants and if they grow well, your soil is healthy. Another option is to get a lab to analyse your soil, but standard lab tests only measure certain characteristics like nutrients and pH, and including more tests can be costly. The third option is to do the soil tests yourself.
This post is a collection of 10 simple DIY soil tests that you can do at home. Most require no equipment or purchase.
In my post Fertilizer: Selecting the Right NPK Ratio, I explained that you don’t feed plants – you feed the soil. Your job as a gardener is to add missing nutrients to the soil. If the soil contains all the nutrients plants need to live – the plants will do well.
The answer to the question, what fertilizer do plants need, is very simple. They need any nutrient that is deficient in the soil. If your soil is not deficient of nutrients – you do NOT need to fertilize.
But how do we know which nutrient(s) is deficient in the soil? I’ll try to answer this question in this post. In order to do that, we need to better understand what nutrients do in the soil.
