Is Soil PH Effected by Leaching (flushing)?
Pecci
6 years ago
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soil pH
Comments (11)Whilst digging a hole to plant a tree, at a depth of about 18" I hit a whitish layer of soil that was so hard I could only chip small bits of it off with a forged steel irrigation shovel. The bits chipped off in small shards. The soil above that layer was a medium clay. The hard layer was about 6" thick and below that was a gravelly, rocky layer. It is my clear understanding that this hard layer is formed by calcium and other minerals leaching toward the surface in hot weather. The pH of the clay soil above this hard layer is about 8. I guess you'd have to appreciate how hot and dry it gets in SW Idaho to believe that this is the mechanism that formed this concrete-like layer. The average rainfall is 11" and almost all of that falls in winter months. Summertime temps reach over 100 degrees, sometimes for weeks. In California near Redding/Red Bluff I have family that built a house up on the bluff. Again, it gets well over 100 in the summertime. The dominant vegetation is a scrubby kind of oak, mesquite, and sparse grasses. Temperatures sometimes 115 degrees. To install a septic leach field required bringing in a tractor with a huge auger. The auger was used to bust through the hardpan and make a drywell that gets filled up with gravel. This hardpan, found in arid parts of the country, is caliche, a layer of calcium carbonate. Quoting Wikipedia; "caliche can also form in other ways. It can form when water rises through capillary action. In an arid region, rainwater will sink into the ground very quickly. Later, as the surface dries out, the water below the surface will rise, carrying dissolved minerals from lower layers upward with it. ... Plants can contribute to the formation of caliche as well. The plant roots take up water through transpiration, leaving behind the dissolved calcium carbonate, which precipitates to form caliche."...See MoreCheapest way to test soil pH using red cabbage
Comments (42)I don't put any sulfur in the holes of the roses pictured. The other holes with sulfur didn't bloom well. My heavy clay is very retentive, there is no leaching here. Here's a quote from Nutrient Stewardship site: "Phosphorus is the nutrient most affected by pH. ..Nitrogen, Potassium, and sulfur are less affected. At alkaline pH values, greater than pH 7.5, phosphate ions tend to react quickly with calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) to form less soluble compounds. At acidic pH values, phosphate ions react with aluminum (Al) and iron (Fe) to again form less soluble compounds." It's good to test if one's tap water is alkaline, some cities add lime to water so pipes won't corrode. Calcium in lime will bind with phosphorus, and less is available. In my 12 years of growing flowers in pots, the year that I got continuous MOST blooms despite my pH 8 water was when I used high phosphorus SOLUBLE fertilizer, and low nitrogen. Granular phosphorus like bone meal and 46% superphosphate are useless in the planting hole here in alkaline clay. My results confirmed what University of Colorado stated "bone meal and rock phosphate can only be utilized at or below pH 7". My pH 7.7 soil was tested most deficient in phosphorus. Here's a quote from David Neal, CEO of Dyna-Grow Plant Nutrition in CA: "There is some evidence to believe that low N helps to convince a plant to stop its vegetative growth and move into its reproductive phase (flowering), but environmental factors are probably more important. P is typically 5th or 6th in order of importance of the six macronutrients. There is little scientific justification for higher P formulas, but marketing does come into play ...." He's right, just a tiny bit of SOLUBLE phosphorus made more blooms and more roots - but beyond that is wasteful. The site, Robert Morris NOBLE plant foundation, rated the mobility of NPK: "Let's compare the mobility of NPK on a scale of 1 to 10. Nitrogen is a 10 ... extremely mobile and can be lost to leaching. Potassium is a 3. It has limited movement in the soil. Phosphorus has a rating of 1. It is immobile in the soil and is likely to stay wherever it is placed." Here is a link that might be useful: Soil pH and availability of plant nutrients...See MoreSoil PH and Hard Water
Comments (10)From what I've learned rain tends to be on the acidic side. Which normally helps us here where our soils lean to the alkaline side. But with little rain the last two years I had no rain to leach it out. I do try to water less often and deep water when I do. But when the water I'm using is alkaline and then carrying soluble salts and other minerals I'm not gaining much if any by deep soaking. Using sulphur, bone meal and a soil inoculant my PH dropped from a range of 7.5 -7.9 in 08 to 7.2 this last year. I hadn't had a soil test ran in years. My thought has always been that if the plants look healthy and are producing well things have to be ok. I'm not sure even if I had ran the tests they would of showed much till after the first year of the drought. We went 12 months with just over 4 inches of rain. So basically all my watering was from the faucet. Which compounded the problem. I will continue to test every fall till I have it in line. And then I've promised myself to test at least every 2-3 years. But then thought I had better just keep doing it every year. Because if I ever skip a year then I probably won't test again till I see problems. As you garden you will notice problems fairly fast. What takes a year to develop can take several to correct. Although I've always been able to grow most things I've tried here. Blue berries is one plant that like you said would hang on a few years and struggle then just give it up. Now I know why. Like Dawn I've decided at the present I'm not willing to spend the time it would take to try to maintain a PH level to grow them properly. Here the extension service will run I believe two tests a year for you free. Then after that they are like five dollars if you are a Kansas resident. Unless you want a more detailed test then they go up. I think two comprehensive tests this year cost me around $30.00. And normally one would be enough. But I broke a new area and last year was the first year for it. So wanted to test it as I knew there would be a difference between the two and there was. Jay...See Moremissed it by that much - soil pH
Comments (8)Let me further confuse the issue and call "salts" the various chemicals that cause "alkalinity" when they're dissolved but then dry out and leave that white stuff. That crusty ring on the 3 year old potted plant container that looks like salt. In the Great Basin / Inter mountain West, much of the place used to be a sea, and as that disappeared, it left concentrations of the various salts in the sandstone, clay, and other soils. Generally speaking, the top layer, where the plant roots are, is fairly well leached out. However, areas where natural run-off through porous soils will accumulate the salts, and thats where one finds the dead-cow skull by the pool of water in a white landscape, and the cowboy jumps of his horse, slurps the water, and then sez 'yuck' because it's so alkaline. Irrigation in the inter mountain West can effect this in two ways, depending on the sub-soils. The irrigation water dissolves the salts, dispersing them throughout the soil. then the water evaporates, leaving a higher concentration of salt in the top layers. So, they irrigate more. Which causes more salt to come up. Thats why, at least around here, that the best farm land is on the tops of hills, or on a slope, where the irrigator can flush the stuff out and on down the river towards California. On my place, which is on a slope, over the winter the irrigation water I put on in the summer seeps out on the lower reaches of the property, and evaporates. It leaves a white, crystalline residue, that just crumbles off the soil when I touch it. I can't remember, but there is now some additive that the guys can use in the flats at the bottom of the hills, the places that accumulated all the leached out salts/akalinity-producing compounds from up the hill, the kind of places that only could support sagebrush. I was speaking to a local farmer who was telling me about this, but he really, really has to watch how much irrigation water he uses because just a bit too much on, the whole field turns white. Guy raises oats and hay....See More
Pecci
6 years ago
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