If you want your plants to grow big and healthy, soil quality matters. Even if you aren’t planning on growing a lush veggie garden, all plants need nutrients to grow, in addition to light and water.

Soil is a key ingredient in any backyard garden, so it’s important to make sure it’s the healthiest it can be. That’s why longtime gardeners – and soil science experts – recommend testing. Knowing the ...

Soil testing can be done any time the soil is workable, but the best time is in the fall. Fall testing is ideal because it gives you plenty of time to get results back from the lab and to begin ...

Most gardeners know that success depends on many factors: You can’t grow a sun-loving plant in a shady area, for example. And a shrub that loves wet places won’t do well in dry soil. But the most ...

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A soil test for phosphorus represents an index of phosphorus availability to crops. A soil test needs to correlate to crop response in order to provide a useful index of crop response and any ...

Soil nutrients are not even. They are not even across a field and they are not even with soil depth. Nutrients can differ drastically just a few inches of soil away. This is true even in ...

One of the essential nutrients for vigorous crop production is nitrogen. Yet most routine tests done in commercial soil testing labs do not measure available nitrogen in the soil. Soil scientists ...