What affect this might have on our environment, and us, is unknown since no research has been done to find out. The bulk of the modification done on any GMO'd crop is for disease, insect or pesticide resistance. For cotton, it is primarily insect resistance - the lack of need to spray insecticides is generally considered by most to be a good thing. Also cottonseed meal - like any other organic fertilizer - needs to go through a process of mineralization before they can be presented in a plant-accessible form. It is hard to consider that with all the necessary decomposition or consumption by soil organisms and the entire photosynthetic process some sort of deadly Frankengenes are going to come back and haunt us. Especially in the concentrations one would normal employ. Lets stay within context here :-)

Still, it's one thing to have someone tell you that finished compost will come out more pH neutral than tapwater and another thing to actually see it. LOL, I had to take several "control" readings with my meter just to make sure it was still reading correctly... ;-p

Ken, it is entirely possible that the pH test was truly 9 and it would be a good reading, but thinking back on your soil situation - high sand levels with lots of watering and nutrient uptake issues, I now suspect you may be flushing those nutrients down through the sand while the plants are indeed still getting adequate moisture. I am also reminded how high organic content soil will grow hosta big and continously over the years - woodland soils with years of leaves mulched in by time, for example grow them slowly but they keep growing - the watering which is needed because of the sandy soil may be a two edged sword for nutrient management. No doubt you have the best draining soil, but you may have the "nutrient rinsing away" affect as well. There was a 1970's hosta grower in southern Delaware, Beets Landis, who grew siebolidana seddlings in very hot sunny sandy soil on a ravine, watered non-stop in summer. Quite sure he put no fertilizer on them, but they grew slowly, if at all. Bruce

becky said: What I think I understand is that OH- is often part of something and it can dissociate to be OH- by itself, until it meets up with H+ (H3O) to form plain water. Is that right? In a solution, there could be H20, H3O, OH-, in various combinations. If H3O and OH- are there in equal amounts, they will merge to plain H2O. Is that how it works? I can go over some basics. I'm not sure what you know and what you don't, so don't shoot me if I go too simple in my explanation. So in no particular order, addressing your comment above: OH- is called the hydroxyl group. It exists as part of many compounds, or molecules. Most any substance that ends in an "-ol" has a hydroxyl group in its structure. In fact alcohols are called alcohols because of this OH group (I'm going to leave off the negative sign unless needed for simplicity). Methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol (butyl alcohol) are some examples. Classes of compounds like phenols and glycols also feature the hydroxyl group. In some cases the hydroxyl group in these molecules acts similarly to what we have been discussing, ie, the hydroxyl dissociates and can be replaced by another anion like chloride. (There are cases where the OH is present in a molecule, but actually sheds the H and acts like an acid, such as in acetic acid, or any acid containing a carboxyl group, but don't let this confuse you. There are always exceptions to the rules). In our discussion about soil chemistry we've been discussing inorganic chemistry and acid/base chemistry for the most part, and much of that kind of chemistry occurs in water, or usually termed "aqueous solution." The hydroxyl group in our situation is present in water and is also introduced to the soil from sources like NaOH, so we are talking about OH floating around free in solution. You say that if H and OH are present in equal amounts, that they will form water. Not necessarily, as follows: To make my point I have to briefly discuss the dissociation of water and pH. (As a side note, you should look up the term, "stoichiometric ratio." When you say you have equal amounts of something, or if you say "2 H's will combine with 1 O to make water," you are describing a stoichiometric ratio. It is the exact amount needed of each reactant). OK, so if I have a glass of pure water it WILL have equal amounts of H and OH floating around, even though you think they should combine to make H2O. It is an extremely small amount of each, just 1x10^-7 mol/liter. The water ionization constant Kw is derived from the concentrations of H and OH by multiplying the two concentrations together, 10^-7 x 10^-7 = 1x10^-14. This is where the pH scale comes from. The 14 is the max on the pH scale. So the important thing to know is that when you multiply the concentrations of H and OH in water together, they must equal 1x10^-14. Depending on what else is in the water, sometimes you will have excess H and vice versa. If you have 10^-4 mol/l of H ions, then you know through algebra that you must have 10^-10 OH ions. So to answer your question, H and OH will not always react to form water when they see each other. There will always be some of each in aqueous solution, and this is the basis for the pH scale. Even though pH below 7 is dominated by H, there is still a corresponding amount of OH floating around (remember that 1x10^14 ionization constant). But you could say, "Yeah but 10^-7 is so small it doesn't even matter." Well it is a small amount, but the whole pH scale from 1 to 14 still deals with very dilute solutions, so it does matter. I thought of another way to put it. Let's make it "Fisher Price" easy by thinking in terms of individual atoms. Lets say in a given hypothetical beaker I have 100 H ions and 100 OH ions floating around in water. Let's also say the ionization constant for water requires these 100 + 100 = 200 ions to coexist without combining to make water. What would happen if we then drop 20 molecules of HCl into the beaker? Well, you could say that the 20 H ions will try to react with the free OH ions to make 20 waters. OK, then we would have 100 original H and now only 80 OH, plus 20 Cl in solution. (Note: The solution always has to be electrically neutral and the 80 + 20 Cl anions balances the 100 H cations, like when morpheus said if grass soaks up a Ca2+ ion it has to kick out 2 H+ ions to remain neutral.) But now we only have 180 total free H and OH, and our Kw said we need 200 ions. So more water will ionize into H and OH until you have 200 of them again. That means 10 water molecules dissociate to make 10 H and 10 OH. That gives us a total of 110 H and 90 OH = 200. OK, so now our ionization constant is happy because we have 200 ions coexising again. The difference is that we have 20 more H than OH, causing the solution to become acidic. Hopefully this give some idea of how and why H and OH coexist in solution even though you think they should be reacting. Let me know if that makes sense, or confuses you more!