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.

Yes. I especially like the one app of Milorganite. I think it is important for bermuda lawns to get at least one dose of organics per year. It's going to help prevent the event where you apply more and more chemical fert and nothing happens. Something about the organic seems to be necessary every once and awhile. I was in that situation with St Augustine and corn meal fixed me up. It was sudden and dramatic. Looks like you could get away with an app or two of something with a high phosphorous number, too.

I had to do that search to see what happened. It is what I thought it would be. I was a charter member in 2008 and still love that forum. I can provide a little history... The GardenWeb forum was created by a guy named Spike back in the 90s. Spike was the ultimate judge of what was acceptable here. For example, if you tried to post profanity, when you hit the Submit button, your post was erased and you found yourself at disneyland.com. It was hilarious until you found yourself "sent to Disney," (ahem). The forum was growing as more fora were added, and, in the early 2000s, Spike had an opportunity to sell. The new owners (not Houzz, yet) implemented Spike's vision but tried to use forum moderators. Trouble was nobody knew who the moderators were. These owners added sh-tton of advertising, which was a new and unwelcome idea at the time. The lawn care forum split off to have an organic lawn care part, because the arguments were intolerable. More forums were added and the community grew huge, fast. I don't remember the catalyst in the lawn forum, but it quickly grew into a dumpster fire. You could not get advice due to the megalomaniac personalities involved. A large group of us left GardenWeb and started an independent forum. A few of us/them returned regularly to GardenWeb to shanghai members here. Those members found themselves banned for life. The new forum thrived for awhile until the absolute power of forum ownership corrupted them absolutely. I personally had my comments changed to correct "errors" which were not errors but were my diverging opinion from the owner of the forum. A couple of the members on the new forum decided to start another new forum. I'm not sure how morpheuspa was not included in the charter membership of that forum but he came to it within a few weeks of the launch. I got the organic lawn care forum going and TexasWeed moderated the warm season lawns forum. TW had some issues with other members, and they found a way of booting him out. Again it is personalities and the ability to tolerate certain indignities. Morph and I both have been in and out of GardenWeb over the years, but that other forum is still going strong. Except for a very few glitches, it is a safe haven to discuss lawn care tuned to your situation. I think the participation has dropped, but the owner tells me it's all going about the same. But if you have a lawn problem, it's probably been discussed in the 10s of thousands of posts on there.

Stephanie: I looked through your links, fantastic info. Thank you. The first link was where I got rose tissue analysis (done by U of CA at Davis) back in 2014. Rose-tissue analysis: more nitrogen than potassium, 1/2 calcium, 1/10 phosphorus and 1/10 magnesium. Kathyc_z10: See below link for info. on alkaline-soil & fertilizer. Below link shows my discussion with BirdsLoveRoses .. she has pH 9 to 10 soil with high salt. She has pH 9 tap-water like I do. If you have any questions, I'm ready to answer here too. My soil test back in 2011 was pH 7.7 with exceedingly high magnesium & low manganese & low calcium. I did gypsum like they recommended, but if I have to do it all over again, I would focus on organic matter (alfalfa and cracked corn) to UP the nitrogen & moisture, rather than gypsum which DRIED OUT MY CLAY (I have rock hard alkaline clay). https://www.houzz.com/discussions/6111804/soil-ph-soil-type-moisture-fertilizer-for-certain-roses#26816464 Below is a thread which I wrote on gypsum is best FOR THE BOTTOM of planting hole only. I also included a map of different soils across USA: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/5971487/calling-strawchicago-re-clay-alkaline-soil-amendments-fertilizers