soil analyzers

I have been gardening for 4 years now but only half heartedly, but this year with all my remodeling and landscaping done I want a garden that I can be proud of with the best tasting veggies in the neighborhood. I want to start with the soil and make sure that my plants get off to a good start. I've seen the soil analyzers in various gardening catalogs that you just push into the soil and it tests for pH, moisture etc. Has anyone out there used them and how accurate are they and what type have you used and who did you buy it from. I bought a moisture meter last year but have used it on soil that I know needs water but the meter displayed sufficient moisture.

Also has anyone made a sketch of a garden that I could follow with good companion plants for vegetables. I know tomatoes like cabbage, onion. carrots, etc.

Thanks for your replies.

I have a ph meter. I am suspicious of its results though, because it says my soil is slightly acidic. I don't believe that, but plan to have a soil test done by the State Department of Agriculture to see if it says that my soil is slightly acidic. I think it probably is good at giving relative readings of ph.
My moisture meter is my finger.

I had one from Brookstone and it worked quite well on moisture, light and ph. But they aren't made to last long and it is now not working. (got 3 years out of it) Vegetable gardens love areas that have lots of sandy loam, and an area of composted sandy loam. There is a vegetable site with a DGer named Farmerdill or something like that and he is quite knowledgable. Root crops like the sandy loam and beans, peas, corn, tomatoes like the composted areas.

This message was edited Feb 10, 2007 2:53 PM

I have a two prong meter that measures moisture, pH and light that I picked up a Home Depot. The key to working with the moisture meter is observing how far you are inserting it into the soil. I test at the 1" and 6" depths. If I am trying to germinate seeds, I pay more attention to the surface moisture and will mist the surface as needed for germination. I find that the meter is fairly accurate. When it says "wet" at the six inch depth and I put the trowel in to test at that depth, I find it wet. The pH seems to be in the general range as my soil test. I wouldn't use this type of meter as a substitute for a good soil test though. I use labs that do a Reams soil test, as this shows what is actually available to the plant versus what is potentially available.

Many soil scientists consider the little commercial meters to be a joke. It seems to me they are so fickle that they are easy to confuse. I second GM's mention of the Reams analysis. There are important things to be learned from a full-monty soil test that you cannot get from store-bought equipment.

Where does one get a Reams test? -- the state ag school or some commercial place?

There are several labs that will run them but I prefer International AgLabs.
http://www.aglabs.com/

They have a "High Brix Garden" program that includes a full soil analysis plus nutrient products that are custom configured for your garden based on your soil test. I believe it's $150 plus $0.25 per square foot of garden space but I could be wrong on that. This price includes whatever rock powders, innoculants, foliar sprays, nutrient drenches etc that you might need. International AgLabs works with both conventional and organic growers, so you need to specify what program you are following in your garden.
http://www.highbrixgardens.com (note: the high brix gardens website is still under construction. Jon Frank at International AgLabs can give you the best information on this program)

I only had the S-1 soil test done, which was very helpful and insightful. I have a friend who is doing the High Brix garden program and is very impressed so far. He's getting very high brix on his crop compared to configuring the plant nutrition himself. (he has healed himself from serious illness by growing his own nutrient dense food). If my garden space were larger, I would have done that as well, but for my 50 sq ft, it was hard to justify the cost when I already had a stockpile of various garden nutrients. Once I use these up I will sign up for the High Brix program.

Hence your birthday president the reflectometer? of some such gadget. I will check all this out. I was planning a soil test this year. I guess its time to get started.

Christmas present. Automatic temperature compensating (ATC) refractometer. My DH ordered mine from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, but you can get them on eBay as well. A garden buddy on the high brix newsgroup said that if you are patient, you can often get one at the opening bid price. You can get a good one for ~$50-$70 dollars. Make sure you get calibrated for 0-30 brix. There are several types.
My cabbages brixed at 11.5 and 12, which is considered excellent. My beets and chard did not fair so well, coming in at 3 and 6, which would be considered poor quality for those two crops. I've given them a nutrient drench and will remeasure on the next sunny afternoon. It will be interesting to see if my summer beet & chard crop comes in with higher readings. My current thought process is that the beet family needs more sunlight than the cabbage family.

Hmm. Sounds interesting. I have always wondered whether the crops I grow had as good or better nutrients than the grocery store. I think so because they taste better, but I am not sure.

I may get one and try it out this summer, I have really worked on the pathetic soil here, but I suspect it needs more work, particularly outside the hoophouse. Where the tomatoes go in the hoophouse has had the most amendments added and it is doing better than anywhere else on these two lots. Luckily poppies like poor soil, my big consolation! This past summer working off and on I redid the veggie garden with a humungous amount of compost, because it was absolutely terrible. Be interesting to see what it does now.

We added a lot of amendments to our garden bed to improve on the concrete-hard adobe clay native soil. The bed was productive, but I did have a minor problem with powdery mildew on the curcurbits and the okra just wasn't as happy as I would have liked. The soil test confirmed my suspicions that I had a calcium deficiency, even though I had added oyster shell and gypsum at the beginning and needed manganese. Jon at IntlAgLabs told me my soil had a C.O.O.F. (pronounced like "cough") which stands for chronic overuse of organic fertilizers. A review of all the amendments added showed that I had applied too much manure and brought the sodium levels up higher than recommended. I followed their recommendations and the winter crop is doing very well overall.

You still have to look at the garden and see what the plants are telling you. As Arden Andersen stated in the agronomy seminar, "treat the patient, not the lab test", eg, a soil test is a great tool, but still only a tool. That said, the correct tool make the job easier.

This article on soil health is from 1994, but still relevant today, especially the points about needing to remineralize the soil (or rebalance the minerals in the soil):

http://www.consumerhealth.org/articles/display.cfm?ID=19990303122846

Mermaid, that must be what was wrong with my peas years ago in Arizona. I double dug the whole garden putting a deep layer of manure underneath the topsoil, and still got mildew on the peas. Was I annoyed!

Since the hoop house gets so rampant in growth I have to whack things back to even walk through it in August, I think it is doing reasonably well, especially considering its condition when I began with it. I used to have tons of grubs in the soil, and since working on it and building a worm population, I don't see any grubs if I dig a hole in there to plant something. Still have plenty outdoors though.

It will be fun to try to get things more focussed. And the article you referenced was quite interesting. One of my main concerns is to get the proper minerals back in our diet.

I have used rock phosphate, bone meal and colloidal clay phosphate, but never had a clue whether I was adding too much or too little. I do hope to find out.
Like you, Mulch, my soil varies in quality throughout the yard. Some places have been composted every year for 5 or more years. Others only two or three. Our soil here is very poor in phosphate. I don't know about calcium.
One reason I grow a vegetable garden is that I can get my vegetables fresh. Many of the vitamins we need deteriorate if they are shipped and stored for days on end. I like being able to run out to the back yard and pick my veggies right before the meal so they will retain their nutrients. Of course, in the winter, I don't get to do that. I am not much into canning, freezing and drying. Harvest time is the time when I plant my flowers instead of preserving food.
I had no idea how exhausting retirement would be!

I have put rock phosphate on all the gardens, some bone meal with the outdoor bulbs, more of it with the tomatoes, added rock dust in the hoophouse, plus loads and loads of manure and grass clippings. I have mostly been more interested in flowers than veggies, but I want to get some good veggies going outdoors. The tomatoes, of course, are always high priority on the sacred list, ha! Since I have quit using the big straw bale compost bins, I have been burying the veggie scraps under the mulch.

I am glad you find retirement to be an exertion, the ones who don't seem to fossilize and wither away rapidly.

Here is a "series" of articles on the subject of getting minerals in the food and how it affects digestion.
http://www.advancedideals.org/024_RBTI_articles.html

It is indeed very frustrating to work out a healthy, healing diet only to be thwarted by the lack of nutrition in the food as grown today. I measured the brix on the organic apples I purchased at the store. They were 11.5 brix. From the chart in the article above, that puts them in between average and good. These have been the highest brix apples I've been able to find locally. I'm using my refractometer at the stores & markets and refusing to buy anything below the average brix chart reading, and buying more of those items that are higher. Thankfully my garden provides as much as it does, even if not enough to supply our entire diet.

Isn't it sad that when our "fresh fruits & vegetables" have become empty (almost) calories?

mermaid -- please tell me you probe the fruit and vegetables AFTER you buy them.

Yes greenjay, I pay for all my "probes". I do not leave damaged goods behind for others to find. Drives me nuts when I see someone making fingernail holes or bruises on fruit and then leaving it for someone else.

When I use bone meal I don't worry about levels of Phosphorous because it is slow to break down. When I was in Seattle that is why I used Dolomite lime, it neutralized the acidity but never too much. I think any dry climates like the rockies have LARGE amounts of calcium in the soil. Places like Michigan don't. We don't have the run off to take away our salts and the great lakes does. Or am I all wet any experts who have soil tested in the Rockies?

I'd still do a soil test to check. We were always told that adobe clay was "rich in minerals". It's rich in some, poor in others. You may just need to adjust the mineral ratios in your amended moondust, or it may be just fine. What I like about the Reams type soil test is that it tells you what is actually available to your plants, versus what is "potentially" available.

Dolomite lime is considered an undesirable fertilizer under the biological program because it results in tightened soil with restricted air spaces and reduced nitrogen efficiency. Chloride fertilizers like calcium chloride or potassium chloride are also no-no's. Calcium, nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilizers should be combined with a carbon source like, sugar, molasses, humic acid, humate, fish, seaweed or compost.

Dolomite in Seattle glacial rock and sand should not be any problem. There is a constant dissolution of mineral salts with the 7months of rain. Therefore the mineral defficiencies that do exist and require supplement. I would aggree in other areas where rainfall has no where to go. Do you know how it affects nitrogen availability or uptake? Interesting concepts.

Too wet makes the nitrogen unavailable, I think. Gads, was it the other way around... I need to get my old charts out.

Generally, in the heart of the rockies, soil is alkaline and, depending on base material and local geographic history, pretty rich in many minerals (trace and otherwise.)

For instance, my local macos-formation clay is ver rich in everything but nitrogen. (so rich at times it is too much for some plants.) However, the iron is hard to extract for a couple plants, which benefit greatly from amendment and are onyl held over for a while when extra iron is applied.

The other unique thing about rockies soil is salt, like Steve mentioned. There are many kinds, it usually is chemically deposited in the geography from salt lakes, old oceans or whatnot. It doesn't go away entirely, thanks to low rainfall. But when farmers overwater, it flushes to a new location. (either to the river/lakes or into a neighbour's field, which is deadly to plants).

Mt. Slim: contact your nearest extension agent (in the phone book) and see if they do it or can refer you to a lab who can give you an analysis. It costs 15-25 dollars here. It is the first step in gardening proper, really. (Shame on all of us who skip points A and B in favour of C and D...)

Now I need to go find my soils literature on Nitrogen and bad drainage relationships...

Most county extension agencies use a standard soil test with strong acid extraction solutions. The Reams style test uses a weak acid extraction as this more closely simulates the actions of the soil microbes in making nutrients available. Rations between nutrients, especially the calcium:magnesium ratios are very important in allowing the plants to use these as needed.