Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb , Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today, soil test results. We are going to dive into what happens when you get that report back, and you have all these numbers staring at you in the face. Well, you know I am not doing this by myself. We are joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville.

Hey, Ken.

Hello, Chris. There's there's definitely a lot of numbers on these tests. So if you get an analysis with them, it makes a lot more sense.

It it really does. You know, you could have, someone from the soil lab just sort of hold your hand through the whole process here. That would be great. But that doesn't always happen. You know, we get do get questions into the office, people saying, I've got this soil test report they sent to me, and there's not much information on here.

You know, what do I need to know? What's the important things about this? So we have our soil test reports that we have taken, that we're gonna share with everyone today.

Maybe we should before we get into the, I guess, the the the meat of the the presentation or it's not a presentation, the podcast today, we should do a, a recap on how to take a soil test. So if you're inspired after listening to this, you know how to go about doing it.

You should be inspired after listening to this because every time I am doing a class in person, and, you know, the whole topic of soil testing comes up, I always like surveying the crowd to see, like, who's taken a soil test. And it is very infrequent, rare, not common for anyone to raise their hand and say, oh, yeah. I've taken a soil test. But a lot of these people have been gardening, you know, a long time. So it's interesting.

So how about you, Ken? When you're doing presentations, do you ever survey the crowd to see who's done a soil test?

Yep. And and similar results to you. And then, I mean, we're doing a growing great vegetables class right now and we did that poll and I forgot to save the results, but I think it was 70 plus percent of the people had not done one before. Yeah. So it's it is usually I say, yeah, commonly overlooked or not done.

I would say fortunately though, in Illinois, get myself in trouble for saying this. It's I don't think it's and and most of our soils in Illinois, it's not as big of a deal, as in other places in the in the world or in The US. But it's still a good idea to do it, because it can help help alleviate some problems you may be having or or allow you to to address some problems you may potentially have.

That that is true. Yeah. And many times, you know, I I would say, you and I, we deal with folks that are having problems in their landscape. I bet the vast majority of folks, they don't contact us because things are going alright with their soil or they they don't have that need. But a lot of times, it it it seems like, you know, clients that we help and the soil test would be useful to know what might be causing these issues with their plants or, yeah, why are you not getting as good of a yield off of your tomato plants this year?

Before we do that, Ken, the way that I took my soil sampling and and we can link to our soils webpage. It's Illinoisextension.edu sorry. It's extension.illinois.edu/soil. And on that web page, it describes how to take a soil test. And and for me, just following the instructions on that that web page, it is a lot about randomization.

It is you don't necessarily want to have a a good strategy for collecting your soil samples other than it being random and maybe separating it by your growing areas. If you have a lawn, you would treat that differently than, like, a a perennial or a shrub bed, which would be treated differently than a vegetable garden. And the soil labs, they are going to tailor the recommendations differently based upon what is being grown in that spot. And that's something to be mindful of. But if you really just want a general knowledge of what's happening in your soil, you would take anywhere from six to maybe 10 random samples throughout your yard and mix those all together in a plastic bucket, and you would then take a couple cups, maybe two cups worth into a plastic baggie and you would send that off to the soil lab.

Now that sounds easy, but Ken, is there any how deep down do we go? You know, like what's a good strategy for collecting these sub samples?

Yeah. So again, the the depth is going to vary depending on on what you're sampling for. So like in your lawn, recommendation is usually about three, four inches down, that you would dig. Vegetable gardens are usually five to eight inches deep. And then if you're doing trees or shrubs, things will be rooted a little more deeply, ten, twelve inches deep.

Is is typically what the recommendation would be for how deep you're digging in. You know, basically, you're digging a hole, you take a slice off the side of that, and put that in your bucket or or whatever. Mix those together. You don't need necessarily a tremendous amount, from these. But if you're digging 10 holes that are 10 to 12 inches deep, it's gonna take you a little bit of time, unless you've got one of the fancy soil probe thingies, which will speed up the process.

Which I do have. And those really do speed up that process. And so really, it's just a a sil a cylindrical probe. It's hollow in the middle, but it's sharp on the bottom. And so you just it won't work in dry soil, so you have to, you know, you know, after a rain or something, this helps to use this.

You push this into the soil, and the probe has markings on the side to say see which depth you're at, and then you take it and you twist it and you pop that core right out, makes it really easy. Now again, probably a homeowner is not going to have this because you're not going to be taking soil samples as as regularly as as, you know, like a farmer, fruit vegetable grower, a landscaper might be. And so, yeah, again, you'd probably just use like a shovel, dig a v shaped hole, and then slice off the edge of that hole with your shovel or your trowel or something. And you're basically just trying to replicate that little core that we would be getting with that probe. So, yeah, as Ken said, you don't need that much.

But it has to be scattered throughout the yard and then we we mix it all together.

And you wanna take off take out any plant debris, get out roots and stuffs that doesn't affect the levels that are that are getting returned to you. And, you know, if you're as you're digging, let's say you're in a vegetable garden, you notice there's like big differences in what the soil, is like the texture, the color, that may be worthwhile separating that out area out from the rest and and testing that separately. Because if you've got big differences in texture and color, there's probably gonna be varying nutrient levels and and p or pH potentially. And there's you may need to treat that separately from kind of what the rest of the stuff is like.

Yeah. And if folks have more questions about how to collect those soil samples, we do have a video or two that we can link you in the show description about that that just demonstrates how to how to do that. And then, Ken, the question I usually get following that, you know, description of how to do it is, well, where do I send it? So what do we recommend to folks in terms of what to do with it? Should should they just go to a garden center and buy one of those home test kits?

Yes. That is what yeah. Question you get a lot is, you know, what which which test kits should I buy from the the garden center, the hardware store? And what you can do is those are not going to be nearly as accurate as sending it off to a lab. And sending it off to a lab isn't gonna be that much more expensive, than the home kits.

So I think our our recommendation, I think, even if we weren't working for extension, but extension recommendation would be to send that off to a soil testing lab. And unfortunately, University of Illinois does not have its own soils testing lab. A lot of land grant universities do, Illinois does not. So again, on that soils website, that will be down in the show notes. We do have a a link some links to lab or lists of labs, that will conduct soil analysis for you.

And when you send that off, make sure you're in the you indicate, that you are doing this in a vegetable garden. Otherwise, which we will see in a little bit, you'll get recommendations for corn and beans if the lab is in Illinois or the Midwest more than likely.

That is correct. Because most of the soil tests they get are from, you know, agronomic fields, grain farmers, corn, soybean farmers, like that is the majority of tests that they are processing in those labs. The other thing suggested is maybe give, like, three or four labs a call, see how much they charge for a soil test. I will say for my soil test, it cost me $17 for just a basic garden soil lab test and include about $10 shipping and handling, and it wasn't that expensive. You know?

$27.30 dollars with tax, and then you're you're probably not spending much more, as Ken said, than one of those kits that you would pick up at the garden center. So call a couple labs, see what they might charge, see how they want you to collect those samples if they have any special instructions at all. And then, you know, sometimes if they they might have you create an online account, those can be pretty handy because in the past, a lot of soil labs, they would just mail you a paper report, which then you immediately lose. You know, you might misplace or it just goes and winds up in the trash. But now with our modern day website web based kind of that sales point point of sale for these soil labs, you have an account, which means your reports are saved in your account.

You can track that over time, which I think is pretty handy in some cases. So, yeah, if if you find something like that useful, call the lab, see if that's a service that they might offer.

Yeah. And depending on on where you're at, you may be able to drop them off at the lab, see it save on

that Yes.

The shipping. Because like here in my house in Jacksonville, we've got a a lab. They have a drop box relatively close to Jacksonville, so you can just drive over there if you wanted to.

And that brings up a good point, though. So let's say we call a lab down in Florida. It's a lot cheaper than getting your soil tested than a lab here in Illinois. Should we be sending our samples out of region perhaps? Is there is there might be an issue with that?

Dig back into the, the man the mind here. Remember some pills classes. So there there are different, tests that you do to extract the nutrients. So there's like Bray and Malik and and all kinds of different other ones. Those tests, some of them are gonna be better for different parts of the country than others.

So like in Florida, you know, they use a different type those labs down there, at least the soil lab at University of Florida is going to use a different extraction technique than we would in the Midwest because the soils are much different down there. So I would probably shoot for stuff in the Midwest.

Yeah. And I think if you're curious, it looks like the Bray soil test for something like phosphorus is what we typically might see here in the Midwest. That's because Bray tends to work better for more acidic soils, anything below, like, 7.2 pH. And so if you do get your soil test report, you're in the Midwest, you use the Midwest Lab and it says something other than Bray under, like, your phosphorus reading, then you might wanna call the lab and and maybe ask them, like, can you can you con because it can be converted. So can you, like, convert this?

Or a lot of times the labs will hold your samples for, like, thirty days afterwards, and that might require retesting. So just give them a call if you have questions about the particular type of test. But usually, not all the time, but usually, you're gonna see, like, the Bray test for your phosphorus. And so yeah, just because it's soil acidity based.

Should we show show our results now?

I guess that's probably a good idea. Yes. I we we apologize ahead of time for anyone who might just be listening to this podcast. We are going to start we're we're gonna show the actual report from the soil labs that we did receive. We will of course, we'll we'll be describing numbers.

There's no visual thing really to know. But, just just keep in mind, I don't think you'll be missing much, but if you wanna check it out, we will have a YouTube link in the show notes as well.

You want me to go first? Example of somewhat what not to do.

Ken's is weird. But yes, go go ahead, Ken.

Alright. So this is a soil test we did actually at our, Luqueman Garden site a couple of years ago. I think the, the soil testing video that we show on the extension website, I think it was actually the soil we took, from that. So this is a this is a few years old, but so for this one, all I have is a text file, and a Excel file. This is much easier to read, than those others.

But here you can see, we got soil tests. We we just had one sample that we sent in because of the the soil there is pretty uniform, at least the area where we're gonna be planting in where we tested, look pretty similar. So we've got, soil pH, buffer pH, p one would be our phosphorus, k is our potassium, Ca, calcium, Mg, magnesium. We have OM percent, so that's organic matter percent. We have canine exchange capacity and we have base saturation are the ones that were given on this.

So our soil pH is 6.6, buffer pH is seven point zero. So basically the buffer pH is going to kind of give you an indication of how difficult is the right term, but how easy it's going to be to adjust the pH of that soil, how resistant that soil is to resist to changing pH. So for ours, it's it's not bad. We're not we and we don't need to raise our pH, so it's not really an issue because ideally, we're growing in something around six to seven, for the pH for garden soil. So we're we're fine there.

Our phosphorus, have 83 pounds per acre, which I think is along the high, side for that one. Potassium is four fifty one pounds per acre, which is also on the high side. Calcium, 5,295 pounds per acre. Again, high. Magnesium, 862, again, on the higher end.

On this side, we had not grown in this side at all. It had been grass and pasture for a long time. So there's really no not a whole lot of of, inputs or management that that we were aware of for the last several years, going into this. Organic matter, we've got 3.5%. Typically, I think we would want somewhere to 5% range is typically what we're looking for, in like a vegetable garden situation.

So we're fine there. Cation exchange capacity, is basically how how available nutrients are, to to plants, and stuff. And then so the the base saturation is is kind of the percentage of the soil's cation exchange capacity, that's taken up by the different, elements or nutrients there. So kind of for calcium, the ideal range is is 60 to 80%. So we're good on that one, on the soil test that we have.

The magnesium, 10 to 20%. So again, we're we're good on the higher end of good, but we're still kind of within that ideal, ratio there, percentage there. Potassium, two to 6%. So again, we're we're good there. Hydrogen should be less than 30%.

So, you know, our nutrients levels may be a little high. You know, we're we're we're good. We don't really need to add anything. And then for recommendations, we've got recommendations and this is ounce per acre. Because we did not indicate or forgot to indicate that this is for a vegetable garden, we have recommendations for how to grow corn, beans, power greens, legumes.

So hundred bushel corn, 30 bushel bean recommendations here. So if we're trying to grow corn, recommendation would be a 21 pounds of nitrogen, 19 pounds of phosphorus, 12 pounds of potassium on that. So since we're not trying to grow corn, we don't we have not really fertilized any of this stuff out there and we have our yields have been just fine. We don't have any deficiencies. You know, our tomatoes still put on an ungodly amount of tomatoes, and stuff.

So, you know, this is I don't how indicative this is of Illinois, but I don't think this would be too uncommon for an area where you haven't really grown a whole lot in. We've got good nutrient levels and stuff. We don't really need to add fertilizers, maybe a little nitrogen. But other than that, we haven't needed to don't really need to add anything. Now we need to go back and probably retest after this growing season to see what our levels are like, but we haven't seen any indication of any kind of drop off on our yields or anything like that.

Yeah. I was gonna say this looks like an Illinois soil, like high nutrients, pretty good organic matter content, good CEC. Like, you're you got everything going for you here, Ken, at the Luukman Garden. So this looks great despite the fact they gave you recommendations for growing hundred bushel per acre corn, but I think it looks great. Yeah.

You don't even need to add any lime. Your everything is spot on right here.

So one of the many advantages if it will must be a good soil.

Yes. So you shared your soil report. Time to see this one. Alright. So this soil test report that I am showing you, this comes from my backyard.

I took samples from the lawn where I was located. Was pretty much adjacent to several landscape beds. The air I kind of wanted also to separate samples for the the landscape beds that were mulched, but actually I put my probe down there. Some of that soil is still frozen. So goes to show mulch is a great insulator both in keeping soil warmer and colder.

So I still had a little bit of ice down there, so I was not able to get this sampled. But so this soil report, we're just going to take you through this. We did use a different company than what Ken had used, so my report's going to look a little bit different. But it will tell you when they received it, they got this, my sample on March 6, They completed the sampling on March 10. So great turnaround time.

I did name the sample home one after Admiral Akbar's ship from the movie Star Wars, the Jedi Strikes Back. So no. Not the Jedi Strikes. That's the Empire. The the Return of the Jedi.

I need

to get my movies right. My goodness. It's a trap. Ken's like, Ken said you failed. Return of the Jedi.

Okay. Home one. So this is a three page report. This first page is going to go through a lot of the numbers that Ken had just described where, yeah, we're just looking at these different readings that they got from their test report. Our organic matter here, very much in line with what Ken had.

My in my yard, it is 3.3%. And in in this case, yes, we are pretty much right where we would want to be for our organic matter content. And then it goes into our phosphorus readings. You know, looking at the it says Bray test here, have a weak Bray, strong Bray, and so I'm in parts per million for my report, whereas Ken was in pounds per acre for nutrients. So units can be different here.

So for Ken, pounds per acre, he was the ideal range is 20 to 40 pounds, but for me in parts per million of phosphorus, I am looking anywhere from 10 to 20 parts per million for my weak bray. And as you can see, I'm at 29 parts per million, which the lab, this h right here indicates high. And so I know that I have an excessive amount of phosphorus. We move on here to potassium. I am at a 79 parts per million, which for Ken, again, for his pounds per acre, that kind of max threshold is 250 pounds per acre of potassium.

For parts per million, it is 125. So I am the lab indicates I am very high. I'm VH on this one. And then we get to magnesium. Just sort of speed this up here.

Three hundred and forty two parts per million also indicated as very high. And my calcium here is is indicated at a 1,306, which this is rated as low. So this is something that that maybe we'll keep an eye on. We'll see what the soil test then recommends here in the next few pages. Sodium levels, 37, which I guess if we also that's measures your sodium, but we also look at some of our salts.

You know, my salts, if I jump down to the bottom right hand corner of this this table here, is measured in I wanna say it's like I don't know what this I don't know what this is, but it's measuring electrical conductivity. Bet it's like micromoles or something. But what we're looking at, I have a rate reading of point four, which they list as a low soluble salts because you don't want very salty soils. That can be bad for your plants. So point four is considered low.

If you go over point five, you get to medium. 1.26, you have high. Anything pretty much over 1.75, you got some salty soils there. You might be able to sprinkle that on your french fries. Alright.

So jumping back up here to this top line, very interesting for an Illinois soil. My soil pH is 5.5. That's pretty acidic even for Illinois standards. So I do I I maybe this can explain some of this. I also have some blueberry bushes that I got from a friend, and and he had described how they sort of struggled in his yard, but they've really done pretty well in my yard, and this might be why.

Blueberries like an acidic soil of, like, 4.8, and I have a soil pH of 5.5. And my buffer index, and as Ken described that as, it's kind of that resistance to change. It's not at a seven. It's not at a neutral. It is also kind of low.

The lower it is, the harder it is the more it will resist changing to be more alkaline, to go up. So I I don't think it's that big of a I don't think my buffer index is going to be an issue here, but I don't know. I've never really had to play with soil pH. You know? It's always just been in the sixes, and I've been okay with it.

Far as my cat oh, go ahead.

Let's just turn your lawn into a a blueberry patch and

I I told my wife that I'm like, you know, maybe we should just go buy a bunch of azaleas, rhododendrons, because they also like an acidic soil. We're just gonna have to pick acid loving plants, and I'm fine with that. So my my cation exchange capacity or CEC is a little bit lower than Ken's was, but not bad. It's at 13.5. And, you know, looking at our extension website, you know, where we kinda give a recommendation for CEC, what is best for a garden setting, we're looking at anywhere from, like, 15 to 20 CEC, that range right there.

You get over 20. Once we get to, like, 25, we get into, like, heavy heavy clay, like a clay pan soil, you know, like a pure organic soil or a muck type soil. And and that clay why does a heavy clay soil have such a high CEC? Well, because clay particles are so small, but they're plate like, they stack on top of each other, and this means that there's a lot more surface area for them to hold on to nutrients. And so clay, even though I know people don't like it, you know, we all complain about our clay soil, Clay does play an important role in nutrient holding capacity for our soils, and so that that is just just something to be to be mindful of.

Thank your clayey soils every once in a while for the nutrients that they hold. And then, of course, my base saturation, you know, it looks fairly decent. Ken, I forget the ranges that you had mentioned earlier, but I might have a few that are a little too high, and I might I don't know if my potassium is is right or not or my sodium, if that's still in line with the base saturation levels that you had referenced earlier, but everything looks to be on the up and up.

Yeah. Let's see here. Calcium, 60 to 80. Magnesium, 10 to 20. Potassium, two to six.

Hydrogen, less than 30.

Okay. I think we're looking good. This lab also did test the nitrates in the soil. This can be a tough one to to analyze for soil labs because nitrogen is not a it's not a very permanent thing. It it it fluctuates in the soils.

It goes from nitrate to nitrite. There's our atmosphere is chocked full of nitrogen. When plants are growing like crazy in, like, June, they're using a ton of nitrogen, so are the microorganisms in the soil. So nitrogen, it changes. It can also leach through the soil.

It can go away. So it's it's very difficult to get an accurate measurement of nitrogen in your soil. So very often, I skip this on a soil test. I don't really pay much attention to the nitrogen readings here because the lab knows this too. And very often when you get a lab report, they're going to give you nitrogen recommendations regardless of what this might say because depending on what crop you're growing, there are there is research based upon how much nitrogen those crops use, and then they just give those recommendations like, you know, we assume this crop is going to use this much nitrogen throughout the year, and this is how much nitrogen you'll need to apply to your soil.

So just something to be mindful of. Maybe talk to your soil lab about those nitrogen numbers, but I typically ignore them. Do you ignore nitrogen numbers, Ken, on soil reports?

Yeah. I'm not sure how many I've seen actually have it on there. That must be the lab. I don't know. A lot of people use around here doesn't do it.

So

Yes. And the home test kits definitely don't give you an accurate reading just on nitrogen, so just be mindful of that. Alright. Our second page here, this is just a a basic recommendations recommendations page. So, really, they're splitting the first page of what they analyze.

The second page are recommendations. So we'll show that here for you right now, but I want to quickly flip to the third page, which has everything summarized. And I think this is a much easier way of looking at this information. Yes. You can go back up to that first page.

You can look at all those numbers and look up the ranges that are ideal. But here, hey. They've got a chart of each thing, and it has it's like a bar graph, and it says low, medium, optimum, or very high. And each of our nutrients is listed here, and it it this they all have their own corresponding bar where it falls on idea on the scale here of do we have enough? Do we have too much?

Do we have too little? So I think this is very visually more appealing to to me. So again, in terms of what we just talked about on that first page, everything looks to be optimum in terms of our organic matter, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium. Everything is looking very good on here. Calcium is a little bit low.

Salts are good. CEC, good for what we're using it. PH, little low. A bit low. On the other right side of the screen here, they give us a suggestions for what to do for your lawn.

So as I said, this is sampled from a lawn. This is gonna remain lawn, and so I made sure to specify I want recommendations for turf grass. And they are going to give the handy thing here is that they give this in 100 square feet, 1,000 square feet, or an acre. So probably most of us are going to be dealing if you're in a vegetable garden, probably by 100 square feet. If you're in, like, a lawn or landscape, probably by a thousand square feet.

So per thousand square feet, I need to add about 2.87 pounds of nitrogen. Now that needs to be split up so that I only apply one pound of nitrogen per application in per thousand square feet. So this is probably, like, two and a half ish fertilizer applications for the lawn. And they still do recommend adding phosphorus, which I'm already at optimum. I'm gonna skip that because phosphorus, it binds the soil and it doesn't go away unless it erodes through soil erosion.

So I don't want to risk building up my phosphorus levels too high. Because I've seen that in a few soil reports where over decades, folks have been putting ten ten ten on their their lawns. The ten ten ten being nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. That middle number p, phosphorus, they were getting issues with their woody plants turning chlorotic, and I suggested doing a soil test. When that soil test came back, the phosphorus was literally the bar chart was off the chart.

It was higher than what the chart could measure. And doing a little bit of reading when you have excessive amounts of phosphorus, you can actually block the uptake of metal ions to our our plants, our woody plants being the first susceptible ones to that. And that's what they were seeing with that chlorosis. The plants weren't able to take up the iron and zinc and all the other metals that they're required to use as micronutrients. And then potassium, again, I'm at optimum, so I'm just gonna ignore this phosphorus and potassium.

I'll probably do one fertilizer application, and then I'll return my clippings back to the lawn, is equivalent to another fertilizer application. If you return those clippings throughout the year, it's like adding one pound of nitrogen back to your lawn. And then all the way down here, we have our lime. And I don't know, Ken, I'm debating whether or not I need to lime this or just embrace the acidic nature of my soil. But I can add about five pounds.

6.2 is what they have here, but you can go get, like, lime in, like, five pound bags, 25 pound bags, 50 pound bags. But, you know, you could go put down a five pound bag of lime in a hundred square feet and call it a day. I don't think I'm gonna bother, though.

Sounds like a good experiment. Do some Yes. And not others.

See what happens. Maybe I should do that because yeah. The lawn does struggle. I always blame my dogs and kids, though. But I could try to put some lime down in a hundred square foot area, mark that, and see if it does any different.

It's a good idea. Well, that was a lot of great information about soil test reports. If you have questions about your soil test reports, it it is important to know a lot of times the labs will have like an agronomist or someone who can help you interpret these. If not, please feel free. You can reach out to your local extension office.

We're always happy to also look at those reports with you and maybe help guide you into what are some recommendations possibilities. Well, the Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. A special thanks, Ken. Thank you for sharing your Luukman Garden soil test and hanging out with me today to chat all things soil.

Yes. Thank you. And I'm gonna I am gonna do one this year for our home garden. I know I keep saying that, but this will be the year. And I look forward to the results of your experiment with lime.

Oh, me too. We'll we'll see how this goes. I already know I've already scouted out where to get the little five pound bag of lime at the farm store. So I'll go buy that. We'll flag out a spot.

I'll take I'll take some pictures. Maybe we can share it on this podcast next year. Excellent.

Let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. It's getting hot outside. I'm gonna have to straight out the winter clothes for the spring clothes, and guess what else is popping up out there? Spring ephemerals, the flowers that are there and then gone. So we're gonna talk about those spring ephemerals next week.

Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening or if you're watching this on YouTube watching. And as always, keep on growing. We're gonna go right into those details, but you know I'm not doing this by myself. I am joined as always every single week by Hornica sorry, Ken. And guess what's else?

And guess what's else? I can't say it. And guess what else?