Soil Test Result

16 years ago

I totally renovated my front lawn last fall with the help of many of the folks here. I did the whole roundup grass kill, aerating, raking, planting (seed blend suggested by bestlawn - thanks), compost top-dressing, daily watering, fertilizing thing. I even built several of the buried sprinkler stations that I read about in the "Sprinkler" post. I must have done something right because the grass actually grew. I don't post very often, but I read the forum almost daily. Thanks for all your help.

Anyway, I had a soil test done about 1 1/2 weeks ago, and received my results yesterday. I was happy with most of what I saw, especially the percentage of organic matter. It jumped from 2.4% in 2006 to 4.8% now. I mulch mowed the grass and leaves the second half of last year. That plus the compost top-dressing on the front lawn has obviously made a big difference. Even the back yard, which did not receive any compost and was tested separately, jumped from 2.4% to 4.4%. Yea! The one part of the soil test results that I don't understand is "Neutralizable Acidity". This has always been zero with all of my past test results. I guess I always assumed zero was neutral, and didn't pay much attention to it. This year it caught my attention because it is 1. What does this mean? Should I be happy that it changed, or should I be doing something to encourage it back to zero.

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Comments (7)

texas_weed
16 years ago
0? Huh? 7.0 is neutral. What do the recommendations say like add lime or sulfur? There is no known acid to my knowledge with a PH of 0. If it were possible your feet would catch on fire if you stepped on the yard. :-)
mynextlawn
Original Author
16 years ago
That wouldn't make walking through the yard much fun. Although, maybe it would discourage some of the squirrels from digging so many holes. :-)

I don't think it is referring directly to the PH of the soil. The test results list the PH as 7.0. I found the following on the University of Missouri Extension site.

"A routine soil fertility test (pH, neutralizable acidity, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, organic matter, and cation exchange capacity) is recommended under the following circumstances:"

But, it does not go on to explain what neutralizable acidity measures. I guess I should give them a call.
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That's a good first test, and there's nothing severely wrong here. There's plenty of room for improvement, of course, but if you did nothing, your lawn would be serviceable. pH at 5.9 is low, but we'll get there under calcium. OM of 3.8% is fine, but I wouldn't mind seeing it go up. Feed organically if you can, always mulch mow, mulch garden waste into the lawn if you can, and so on. CEC 8.3: Near Philly (hello sort-of-neighbor) that's a sandy sort of fine silt that gets like concrete when dry. :-) More OM will change the nature of that to a bit lighter and less likely to go solid on you, but don't dig it in. Let nature do that for you or it'll cause problems. I don't care much about the actual PPM of things except where they don't have saturation percentages, so I'll be ignoring those when I read them for CA, K, and Mg (Na isn't directly measured in PPM and H is derived by your pH). So--Na 0.7%: Salt level. This is fine. H 21.7%: Just another measure of pH, this is "wasted space" in the soil. We'll fill most of this up. Ca 57.6%: Low-ish in terms of saturation (your PPM isn't that low, however). We use Mir-A-Cal or Encap lime to kick this up--they're very fine-ground fast limes that work extremely quickly (most other things labeled "fast lime" are anything but!) Recommendations below. Mg 17.2%: A tad high, but nothing to worry about (I'd shoot for 10-15%). It'll drift down a bit as calcium rises anyway. K 3.3%: I tend to shoot for 5%, but anything from 3-5% is fine. This will probably need to be adjusted a little next year as the calcium kicks a little out, but for now, it's fine. Sulfur 11 PPM: Fine, this can range very widely and be perfectly OK. Iron 168 PPM: Fine. Even as your pH rises, this should keep an off-the-shelf lawn quite green. For the minor elements (zinc, manganese, copper, boron), boron is low at 0.3%, but if you're feeding organically you'll be pushing in enough boron to compensate in terms of immediate growth, and I'm not inclined to adjust that this year when I'm hitting the soil pretty hard with calcium. Recommendations: April 1: Apply 9 pounds per thousand square feet of Mag-I-Cal or Encap lime. October 1: Apply 5 pounds per thousand square feet of Mag-I-Cal or Encap lime.
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Ignore the sulfur; it never works. The stuff hits the soil, grabs oxygen from whatever source it can (usually air or water), turns to sulfur dioxide, and drifts off into the air as smog. Sulfur only works well when dug in or chemically combined as a sulfate, and there's no point in bothering in this instance anyway. Your pH isn't that borked. No pH is ever that borked. :-) In area 1 only, if your really want to, just feed with any starter fertlizer around Memorial Day and again on Labor Day. That'll take care of it. Test area 2 doesn't require phosphorus and, actually, shouldn't have any--it's very high already and additional P will start getting in the way of other nutrients.
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Whatever you do, you do not need Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) on your lawn. Excess magnesium ions, which you have in spades, causes the soil to become gummy as if it were clay. That might have been the reason you got the soil test to begin with. The cation exchange value of 12.4 says the soil is not clay but has a healthy amount of particles which do not hold onto cations. In other words, sand. That means your soil has some ability to hold ionic nutrients, but nothing like clay does. It is entirely possible to have gummy, sandy, soil. Your organic matter looks good. Still I would use organic fertilizer rather than chemical fertilizer. That's just me. Soil pH is below 7 making it slightly acidic. The ion that often makes a soil acidic is sulfate, so stay away from fertilizers heavy in sulfate, for example ammonium sulfate. It would appear the soil has plenty of calcium, which is normally how people raise the pH of their soil, but you're already up there with both Ca and Mg. It could be that previous owners simply did what their neighbors did and dumped lime every year just because. I am not a soil test guy. The real soil test folks recognize the interactions between the current chemistry and the consequences of adding additional chemistry. I cannot tell you what to use, when, how often, or where to find products. What morpheuspa did not mention was that you could get the $25 soil test from Logan Labs in Ohio and get it read on the other website. They will do the Logan Labs reading for free, and do a much better and more authoritative job than I'll ever be able to do.
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arjo_reich
16 years ago
I can certainly be wrong, but perhaps they're referring to the amount of pH buffering agents in the soil? If I recall correctly it's used to calculate how much lime would be needed to alter the pH of the soil while accounting for how much pH buffers are currently present.

:shrug:

Seems to make sense to me though because compost and other types of organic matter tend to help buffer the soil against random swings in pH so the addition of these materials could be why that value has risen...
User
16 years ago
Neutralizable Acidity

"Technicians add a buffer solution to the sample used for salt pH analysis to estimate the neutralizable acidity of the soil. Neutralizable acidity is a measure of the exchangeable hydrogen within soil. It is used to calculate the pounds of effective neutralizing material necessary to lime the soil to the proper salt pH range."
mynextlawn
Original Author
16 years ago
Thanks morpheuspa. Guess I need to learn to search a little better. I swear I searched the site for a definition. Oh well. Thanks for the info.
dchall_san_antonio
16 years ago
I was happy with most of what I saw, especially the percentage of organic matter. It jumped from 2.4% in 2006 to 4.8% now. I mulch mowed the grass and leaves the second half of last year. That plus the compost top-dressing on the front lawn has obviously made a big difference. Even the back yard, which did not receive any compost and was tested separately, jumped from 2.4% to 4.4%.

Lets see, you got basically the same improvement in the front and back regardless of the use of compost. This is exactly the point I have been trying to make for several years now. It doesn't matter whether you top dress with compost or not, the cultural practices (mulch mowing) make more difference in your soil's organic matter. Please tell me that you water infrequently and you are mowing at or near your mower's highest setting.

Of course this does not mean that I suddenly trust soil tests. I am absolutely convinced that both of your soil tests were wrong. But since they demonstrate my point about compost, can I use them as a reference in the future ;-O
User
16 years ago
I am absolutely convinced that both of your soil tests were wrong.

Hopefully they were both wrong in the same direction and by the same amount. If done by the same lab, that's probably reasonably close within their tolerance.

You may not be able to rely on them absolutely for a good answer, but the relative change tells us much.

Soil Test Result

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