If there’s one positive to come out of our current situation, it’s the incredible surge of interest in gardening. Now more than ever, people are realizing the importance of growing and producing their own food. As any veteran gardener knows. your soil is perhaps the most important factor when it comes to successfully growing your own food. While it’s not necessary for everyone to get their soil tested, on today’s episode I explain when and why you should do it, where you can get it done, and what you should do with the results. Finally, I explain what happens when you have high levels of nitrogen or carbon and what can be down without it. Whether you’re a veteran gardener or a total novice, this episode is a must listen!
Testing resources referenced in this episode:
Colorado State University Soil Testing Lab
Crop Services International
International Ag Lab
>> To begin this homesteading journey, head to http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/grow to access my full library of resources to guide you down the path.
>> Head over to www.theprairiehomestead.com for from-scratch recipes, homestead inspiration, and old-fashioned tutorials.
>> Get your Old-Fashioned on Purpose Swag at www.homesteadswag.com
>> Follow Jill on YouTube: http://youtube.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Instagram: http://instagram.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
If there’s one positive to come out of our current situation, it’s the incredible surge of interest in gardening. Now more than ever, people are realizing the importance of growing and producing their own food. As any veteran gardener knows. your soil is perhaps the most important factor when it comes to successfully growing your own food. While it’s not necessary for everyone to get their soil tested, on today’s episode I explain when and why you should do it, where you can get it done, and what you should do with the results. Finally, I explain what happens when you have high levels of nitrogen or carbon and what can be down without it. Whether you’re a veteran gardener or a total novice, this episode is a must listen!
Testing resources referenced in this episode:
Colorado State University Soil Testing Lab
Crop Services International
International Ag Lab
>> To begin this homesteading journey, head to http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/grow to access my full library of resources to guide you down the path.
>> Head over to www.theprairiehomestead.com for from-scratch recipes, homestead inspiration, and old-fashioned tutorials.
>> Get your Old-Fashioned on Purpose Swag at www.homesteadswag.com
>> Follow Jill on YouTube: http://youtube.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Instagram: http://instagram.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
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welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. I don't know about you, but I am so ridiculously happy to see the surge in gardening lately. Seeds are sold out everywhere. Potting soil is sold out. People are getting this urge to take charge of their food supply, and I kind of love it. I want to offer as much support and resource is as I possibly can if you are one of these new victory gardeners. And in today's episode, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about soil testing. Whether you have an existing garden plot or you're digging one up in your front yard for the first time, do you need to test your soil? Is there benefit? Is that something you should bother with? We're gonna answer all those questions and more. In this episode, I'm your host, Jill Winger, and this is the podcast for the Trail Blazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers and the backyard farmers. If you're ready to boost your food security and increase your self sufficiency, well, you have found your tribe. Okay, so this is based off of a blog post. I did a year or two ago. And if you want to check out the written version cause sometimes I don't know I learned better when I read something, I will include a link to this block post in the show notes. But basically in this blog post, I chronicled the process of how we tested our soil. I think it was year and 1/2 ago two years ago, and it was a really, really eye opening experience for me, and I've had a ton of questions ever since about how we did it if it was worth it, would I do it again and so on. So I thought it would be good to dive into this. In today's episodes of the first question, I think I want to address. Should you bother with this? Did you go to the effort of figuring out how to test your soil? And the answer is it depends. It really depends on your area if you have concerns about the soil. Honestly, we gardened for a good long while with our existing garden plot and never even thought about having the soil looked at, and we did just fine our soil off while it's, you know, heavy and clay, and it may not be the best area to garden. As far as climate goes, our soil is actually fairly decent. So I think that allowed us to get away with a little bit more of a head in the sand approach, if you will, to our first few years of gardening. If you live in an area where you know you have different deficiencies in minerals or you have some issues and maybe maybe you're not sure. But maybe it would be a good idea to talk to some gardeners that you know who garden in your area, and they can kind of give you some hints and tips on what your area might be a little bit low in, um, but that will be the factor. I think that will really play a part in whether or not you need to pursue soil testing in your first few years of this garden adventure. If your brand new now, if you have an existing garden, maybe you've had success. Maybe you've had mixed success, and that might be a good time to do some testings. You can figure out why certain things may not be growing as well as you thought they would, and that is one of the things with us that was eye opening. And it answered some of my questions, which I'll explain in a little bit why certain plans of ours were not as prolific and healthy as I was hoping they would be, and this was able to soil testing was able to fix that conundrum for us. So let's talk a little bit. Let's dive in to how to get this done, because I think that's probably the first question on everybody's minds. Is this Hard is is complicated, and the good news is, it's really not, and it's something you can easily collect yourself. You know, collect the sample, send it into a lab. If you live far away, you can do this through the mail. You don't have to drive it in, and it could be a really simple process. Now I have seen, like floating around on Pinterest or Google, a couple different tutorials for D. I Y soil testing, where you would grab, you know, grab the sample and use baking soda or vinegar or some other sort of kitchen ingredient to determine the pH or different attributes of your soil. And honestly, from what I can tell, it doesn't really seem like these sort of d. I Y. Tests are going to be really accurate or even helpful enough to bother with. So I do recommend that you go through a laboratory of some sort. So you have answers that are more detailed, more conclusive and really give you actionable information moving forward. So we use Colorado State University soil Testing Lab. They are about an hour and 1/2 away from us, But I do believe that even if you're very, very far away from Colorado, you may still be able to request a soil sample container and then mail it into them. So that might be worth looking into a couple other labs that I found after a quick search around the Internet. One was called Crops Services International and another was called International AG Labs. And I will try to put links for those in the show notes if you want to check it out. And honestly, if those links don't work or they don't seem like a fit for you, I am guessing if you go to your county extension agent or some agri sources in your area. Some Google searching, some calling around you're probably gonna have some of your own resource is that you can lean on for this process. I don't think this is complicated to find. Um my test costs about $35 plus postage. So I happen to have a friend who was down in Colorado. She grabbed the little test cup for me and the instructions she brought that home and that I had just filled up and mailed it to them. And it was really fast. It wasn't too long of a wait. So that was That was nice. I didn't have to wait, like, three months to get my results back. When it comes to how to actually collect the soil sample, that's also very, very simple. So what my test directed me to dio would be to dig down about six inches and then grab soil samples from multiple areas of your garden. And what I did since we have raised beds as I grabbed it from a number of different raised beds and kind of mixed that together so I would have a good cross cut of what I'm actually dealing with, because I know some of my beds are a little different, like some have a little more clay and some have a little more compost. I kind of wanted to get a good average view of what I was actually dealing with. And then I mixed those together. I let it dry out, like on a cookie sheet or a board out in the sun, so we didn't have a lot of moisture in there. And then I stuck it in a little cup and mailed it in. And once I stuck it in the mail, I think it was about two weeks before I had the results back. They they emailed them to me. I think they might have mailed it in the actual mail, too. But the results were eye opening. And this is why I do encourage you knew gardeners or curious gardeners to go through the quote unquote hassle of this process at least once or twice. Just so you kind of know where you're at with things. So the biggest thing that we gleaned from our soil test was that our beds were really high in nitrate nitrogen. Um, which totally makes sense because we add a lot of composted animal manure to our beds. My favorite thing. It's a wonderful fertilizer. It's free because we have the animals and nitrogen is a good thing in your soil. And I highly recommend if you can put animal manure compost in your dirt, you're gonna have happy, happy garden. But like anything else, you can have too much of a good thing. And we were right on the edge. Now, even if you're using aged compost, so unaged compost, or unaged manure, Excuse me, unaged manure can burn your plants. High nitrogen that's too fresh can burn your plants, and ours was older manure. But even older manure if you keep adding it to your soil in large amounts and there's not enough carbon and carbon would come from brown things like shavings or wood chips or things like that. Those dry, crunchy sort of compost materials. If you don't have enough brown to offset the nitrogen, it gets high, and what that will do is cause your garden plans to be super bushy and green, but they won't produces much fruit like tomatoes or whatever else you might be growing, and you can't have stunted roots. So when I got that soil test back, I was right in the process of getting ready to ADM. Or compost to my beds. And I put a big giant halt on that process just to give my garden sometime to use up what it already had. And so that was a year and 1/2 ago. This year I have added a little bit more compost in but not going crazy. And it's just been a really good reminder to not add a lot of compost every single year unless I'm also balancing it out with plenty of carbon additions as well. So that was good. I think if I had not gotten tested then I would have continued on my routine of adding wheel barrel loads every spring and probably developed a considerable problem. If you know the story of my poisoned garden from several years ago, you know that that would be my first rodeo as far as doing some major faux paus out in the garden. But the testing prevented, and I'm really thankful some other things I learned just from from our soil test, our personal soil. Um, which this might be interesting to some of you. So our pH is a little bit high. At 7.8, there's a little bit higher than you want, But but the soil lab said that most plants will be able to tolerate that higher pH with not a lot of problems. So they're like, Don't worry about it. Another thing that they tested was the electrical conductivity or the salts in the soil and ours were actually a little bit low at 1.8 now, when the electrical conductivity or that this number is less than 2.0 so ours was right under that salinity, or the amount of salt is not a problem. So we were good. We want low salt in the soil, but if you add a whole bunch of manure, sometimes that can add a lot of salt into the soil. And honestly, it's interesting that we had high nitrogen, but we didn't have a lot of salt, and I this is my very and that was the uneducated. This is my guess here. I think that a lot of times when we get into trouble with salt in the soil because back when I had poisoned my garden, I had a few people say we will potentially, You have too much salt in your soil. And that's why your tomatoes and your plants were acting so weird and adding, when you were can cause this salt problem. I have a suspicion. I think that's more with commercial manure is like that from feed lots and that are fed more of that commercial feed because we just haven't had that issue with our grass fed animal manure. So that's my theory. I could be completely off base with that, but just interesting high nitrogen, but not high on the salt, even though we use a ton of animal manure. Um, so it's that are texture of our soil is sandy loam, which means it will drain at a medium toe high rate So that means it could dry out a little more quickly than other textures. So combine that with our raised beds, which can cause soil to dry out fast. Anyway, I'm glad we have our drip system right now. I know that we do have a lot of clay in our soil, but it's a little bit further down, so I interesting that the texture red at sandy loam instead of clay, so I don't know why. That was a little bit of a surprise to me, but it could just be the sample that they received a swell, um, our organic material. They said It's a little Ours is high at 9.7%. And according to them, they said, we do not need to continue to build up the organic matter beyond where we're at right now, but just to focus on protecting it and replenishing it by using organic mulch, which I'm all all for that on board. What we're doing right now to preserve our soil and to keep that organic matter is adding things like organic grass clippings and buy organic. I mean not sprayed with any sort of chemical. So we've been putting those on top and adding in some betting from the chicken coop. Things like that to keep building up the soil said Our phosphorus was high at 111 parts per 1,000,000 they said that's just natural for our area or potassium is also high at 33,485 parts per 1,000,000 also natural for us, which this might be completely non interesting to you. But I thought for those of you who might be science nerds, just so you know where we're at, maybe you compare it where you're at now. This was another really important piece in the nitrogen. Our iron, so our iron is low at 7.3 parts per 1,000,000. And CSU Colorado State University recommended that we add two ounces of iron per 1000 square feet of garden space. Now, this was a big piece of a puzzle for me because prior to this test, I had noticed that some of our plants, namely my beans, my green beans, really were struggling and they would get yellow, the leaves would turn yellow. And I couldn't figure out why. Because they were getting plenty of water and everything was fine. And then after I kind of had this clue about the iron deficiency I discovered that is a symptom with green bean plants. Plants low on iron can have those yellowed leaves. And I also started to notice that even in some of my flower beds there were certain flowers that were just a little bit yellowed, not super healthy. And so I went to our garden store and I got this little iron supplement. It was a little bottle, and I just I just sprinkled it in very sparingly. I didn't need to add cups and cups. It was just like sprinkling it into the soil. And believe it or not, since I have done that, I have had zero issues with yellow leaves, so that was really, really nice to know. And maybe if you have yellow leaves, that is something you might look into a swell, um, our maganese and our copper and a boron. We're all fine. They said that was good. So really, overall, our soil, even though we live in Wyoming and it's not the greatest Garden state in the Union, I was pleasantly surprised to see other than iron, we're pretty good with a lot of the minerals. A lot of the important pieces, So I'm I'm feeling optimistic. Um, but anyway, that was our test, and I don't know if I'm gonna do it again. I don't think I'll do it again this year. Maybe next year. That would be every third year or so get it tested because I don't feel like it's going to change a whole lot. Maybe I would get it tested just to see how we're doing on our organic matter and our nitrogen content. But it was helpful. And if you're digging up that yard for the first time, you might find it just gives you a little bit of peace of mind. So you have more of a game plan moving forward or the other option is don't overthink it. Put some stuff in the ground this first year or second year and then, you know, kind of trouble shoot as you go, so it kind of depends on your personality and what gives you the most confidence, But it could be a really good thing, So I hope that was helpful. Hopefully it give you some ideas on how you can move forward with your garden this year. So if you're raring to go with this home studying thing, even if you live in the city, you're ready to get more self sufficient. But you're not quite sure where to start. Well, I have something that can help. I have an entire library of resource is I have put together for homesteaders just like you, and you can get free access over at theprairiehomestead.com/grow, and that's it for today. Don't forget to hit. Subscribe. So all the new episode show up in your podcast player. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I would so appreciate it if you could pop over and leave a quick rating or review. This helps more people to find the podcast and bring home studying into their lives. Thanks so much for listening. It's so good to hang out with you and we'll chat more on the next episode of the old fashioned on purpose podcast.