soil PH methods

measuring the runoff of your soil is really not an accurate way to test soil pH. you should test the actual medium with either tabs (cheap) or a meter (expensive). i use sunshine and always shoot for 6.3 in my soil and nutes. if you are using an actual soil and not a soiless mix then i think you should be a little higher at 6.5

dolmite lime or hardwood ashes will help to stabilize soil pH. you should addd them as a topsoil dressing. 1 tbsp per gallon of soil is what i use. lime will add cal/mag so if you are using any cal/mag supplements then you should back off them for a while till you so how your plants react.

Most soil ph testers I have seen are cheapos and not accurately as far as I have seen. Can you or someone recommend a quality one? I ended up using some calcite lime to level my ph but it was easier to go back to wizards which I have not had as many problems with. My theory, which I have seen others talk about, is that if I put in 6.5 nute water and my runoff is 6.3 my soil is about 6.3. If I put in 6.5 and runoff is still 5.8, as it was before I started adding lime to the sunshine, my soil ph is closer to 5.1 and a serious problem. Also as a side note I test the latter half of the run off but not the end. In my theory this gives the water the best chance to change the water before it is saturated and just passing the nute water through as runoff.

Originally Posted by dougoly

Most soil ph testers I have seen are cheapos and not accurately as far as I have seen. Can you or someone recommend a quality one? I ended up using some calcite lime to level my ph but it was easier to go back to wizards which I have not had as many problems with. My theory, which I have seen others talk about, is that if I put in 6.5 nute water and my runoff is 6.3 my soil is about 6.3. If I put in 6.5 and runoff is still 5.8, as it was before I started adding lime to the sunshine, my soil ph is closer to 5.1 and a serious problem. Also as a side note I test the latter half of the run off but not the end. In my theory this gives the water the best chance to change the water before it is saturated and just passing the nute water through as runoff.

i use a bluelab soil pH meter. around $200 i think.

testing your runoff is pointless. i've had runoff that was 6.3 and soil that was 7.0. you need a more accurate way to read the soil pH.

So is this a problem with sunshine#4 because i have the same prob with my soil ph being danger low at 5.1 to 5.5, can you use dolmite as a top dress to help buffer ph?

Dolomite mixed in the soil works better and as for a ph soil tester Home Depot$10.87

Thanks for the info will go to the depot to find the tester thanks again.

Cheap meters, especially the kind with the prongs that is supposed to be for moisture\light\pH, probably aren't very accurate.

I do soil (organic) and don't obsess over pH. I don't use any liquid pH adjusters whatsoever. Dolomite lime and powdered eggshell go into the soil at roughly 2 tbsp per gallon. Most of the nutrients are already in the soil and additional fertilizer isn't usually required or is applied sparingly. Although the Earth Juice I sometimes use makes the fertigation solution quite acidic (pH ~4) even at low rates, I still don't use any pH up and don't need to. Otherwise all that is applied is rain-water with blackstrap molasses (still acidic) and actively aerated compost tea which is usually about neutral upon application. Not checking the soil pH and doing away with pH up hasn't hurt the plants any. In fact I probably had more issues way back when I did think adding pH up to everything was important.

With a properly amended, living soil the pH is adjusted automatically by the microbes and the plant itself. Fussing with pH is more a hydro thing. Healthy living soil doesn't have to be exactly at 6.5 or 6.8 or whatever. Really anywhere from slightly over 6 to slightly over 7 is just fine. Various things in the rhizosphere allow plants to uptake nutrients even when pH is a bit too low or too high... you've got organic acids and humates (humic\fulvic acids) present in compost\humus\earthworm castings and produced by microbes within to naturally chelate nutrients, microbes in the rhizosphere producing bio-slime which affects pH right where nutrients are absorbed, mycorrhizal fungi actively searching for nutrients, making them available and bringing them to the plant, nitrogen fixing bacteria making plant available nitrogen from the atmosphere which prefer a pH over 7.... a lot is going on there.