Soil Test May Direct Gardener Straight to Soil Deficiencies

Summary

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A soil test should be performed before adding soil amendments, including fertilizer, lime or sulfur. Amending the soil without this information could, at best, cause you to waste money applying products you don't need; at the worst, you could be making it more difficult for your landscape and garden plants to survive. A representative soil sample, sent to a reliable soil testing lab, will provide the gardener with valuable information.

A standard soil test will show the levels of several important mineral nutrients: phosphorus (phosphate), potassium (potash), calcium and magnesium. Most Southwestern Indiana soils have adequate amounts of phosphate and potash, although some heavily cropped sites could benefit from additional amounts of these two nutrients. Unless you are gardening on a very disturbed site, or one where large amounts of fill dirt or sand have been added, it's very rare for calcium or magnesium to be low, so normally, we don't worry about those numbers.

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Extract

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Soil Test May Direct Gardener Straight to Soil Deficiencies

Standard soil tests do not provide a measurement for the amount of nitrogen in the soil. This is because nitrogen is v...

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