🪴The Dirt on Dirt: Soil Testing is Your Garden's Secret Weapon
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As the weather gets cool, it’s time to brush off the trowel one more time and dig soil tests! This is the best time of year for checking on how you can bring nutritional balance to your soils as well as prime the soil micro ecology for next season’s plantings. Anything you add to the soil now will have plenty of time to enter the soil food web and be ready for your next season’s veggies to scoop right up! While we might harvest tomatoes and lettuce as gardeners what we truly cultivate first and foremost is the soil. Care for the soil grows a more balanced, healthy ecosystem and thereby a larger, stronger and more bountiful harvest. Soil tests saved the day for me when I was growing down at the Randall’s Island Urban Farm. There, we added a generous dose of compost every year to our soils because I was a pretty firm believer that compost just couldn’t be overdone. But our plants (especially tomatoes) started to slowly lose their vigor over the years. Worse, it happened slowly, I had just thought the tomatoes were a little ‘off’ year over and over until I saw the difference in some of our harvest photos from four years before. A couple soil tests confirmed that all that added compost drove the soil’s pH up well into the 7s - making the soil way too alkaline. Once I made adjustments and brought that pH down again we ate the best tomatoes ever! I love getting this inside look at what is happening in the ground and now take samples regularly from my garden and the gardens I help maintain - and I’ll take samples and interpret them for you too if you like! ​
If you want to fly solo and take your own samples, you are looking to send off an even mixture of the top 6 inches of soil where your plants’ roots do the majority of their work. Here are 6 steps to a good sample:
You can usually expect results back in about 2 weeks. A soil test can look a little daunting, so I look at a couple factors first: -
There are a bunch of great places to send these tests off to - Cornell’s Soil Health Laboratory is pretty amazing, Logan Labs is both economical and complete if a little less descriptive and handhold-y in their results. The tests might not tell you exactly how to handle an imbalance and what to add in what quantities (I will!) but they will give you the opportunity to start figuring it out on your own. Good luck and grow great soil! –Nick ​
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Homegrown Nurseries
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