Test your soil before you start a garden

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There's a mistake someone made and taught me this lesson should in case I decided to have my own garden since I've been looking into doing that one day.

If you fail to test your soil, you're almost inevitably preparing to waste some money. You can put down fertilizers and get no results. This is usually because of an easy to fix problem.

You already know by now that your soil has a pH that determines whether plants can absorb nutrients from the soil. If the pH of your soil is not in the right range then the fertilizer you used will only keep being in the soil. It will not be able to supply nourishment to the plant while there are nutrients sitting in the soil waiting for the plant to take those nutrients.

So that just means you have wasted both money and time by not identifying the actual issue. Testing your soil is not a weird complicated thing. You fig down about 6 inches deep and remove the grass and debris that is on top of the dirt. You will want to take samples from several different areas because one sample is not enough to determine the soil averages. You will also need to have a good idea of what you actually have in the ground.

The wrongest thing to do is buy a cheap do it yourself soil testing kit because they are mostly not accurate. It's better to have the soil tested by a laboratory and you will get exact values for nitrogen phosphorus potassium and pH. This information will specify exactly what your soil requires. You can ignore all this but if you invested money and you make mistakes because you didn't test your soil, you ignoring this is to be blamed for losing the money.

This advice is for those with more than two seasons. The best time to do soil tests is in the fall. If you test your soil in the spring the time to fix your soil is too late to help the plants for that growing season. Testing in the fall allows you to fix the soil over the winter and prepare the soil for planting in the spring. The friend has been overseas so he knows what he's talking about.

This advice is for anyone who wants to grow healthy plants. If you do not complete this step you will have the same problems year after year. Fixing the soil is the first step to working with the soil. Everything else will depend on the foundation of soil.

_{Posted using SteemX}