How do I Test my Garden's Soil?

It’s that time of year when you need to start thinking about adding soil amendments to your garden and getting your soil as healthy as it can be. But, before you add anything to your soil, you need to figure out what your soil needs. Watch as lawn and garden expert, Amy Grisak, explains how to test your garden’s soil.

Video Transcript

How do I Decide what My Soil Needs?

Hi, this is
Amy Grisak from North 40 Outfitters, and today I'm going to give you a few
gardening tips. So it is springtime, and it's time to think about adding
amendments to the garden and getting you that soil as healthy as it can possibly
be before you get anything planted. So the first step you want to do before you
add anything to your soil is to figure out what your soil needs. And one of the
easiest ways is one of these inexpensive and super easy to use little test
kits, where you put a sample of soil in and the appropriate vile, and it's
going to tell you how your nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels are, along
with what your pH looks like. Now, in many parts of the West, our pH is a
little high, which means we're pretty alkaline. So that's good to know when
you're adding whatever you want to add, whether it's compost, manure, sulfur,
or anything else, to be able to bring it closer to that base level, where a lot
of the plants are the most happy.

How to Prepare your Soil Sample?

So one of the first steps you should do in the spring, like I said, get one of these fun little things, great for the kids, test your soil and see how the nutrient levels start. The next thing you want to do, if you don't know already, is do a very simple little settle test. Basically what you do, you go on the garden, get roughly a cup or so of soil. And a lot of times you'll want to pick samples from different levels down and in different spots, add it to the court jar, add an equal amount of water and shake it up. Let it sit somewhere overnight and it's going to settle out into layers. And it'll be, clay will be on the top, then we have silt, which is kind of the medium sized particles, and then sand on the bottom, as well as any rocks that might be in there. So by taking a look at these layers, you can do special calculations to figure out what everything is or you can just eyeball it.

What are the Ideal Ratios for Soil?

So what you really want to get a nice loamy soil is roughly 20% clay, 40% silt and 40% sand. So if it's off a bit, and mine, I'm pretty heavy on the sand end, you're going to want to adjust that accordingly by adding organic materials in there to be able to help balance out that soil structure. If you have any more questionings about gardening, be sure to stop by any of the North 40 Outfitters locations or visit north40.com.