Soil Testing for New Gardens
Creating and building a new garden bed is an exciting time. When you are building a new garden, soil testing is an important step to ensure that your choice plants will thrive and grow over the years. Soil testing is inexpensive and you should never underestimate the importance of this step.

Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006

When you test your soil, there are a few steps to ensure that you are performing the testing correctly. Be sure that the bucket and shovel that you are using to gather the soil are not rusty and are not made of galvanized metals. This is likely to give you false readings in your soil samples. If possible, a plastic bucket with a stainless steel shovel is going to be your best option.

The best sample of soil is going to be from five to eight inches in the earth. Taking samples from the top levels of the soil will not give you the overall reading that is going to represent what your roots are feeding off of. The reading could be misread because of compost, dead materials or other items that are not yet decomposed into the soil fully.

Take samples of soil from various areas in your garden. It is not over the top to test eight to ten different soil samples. This will give you more accurate results than if you were only to do one or two.

If you are mailing your soil away to a testing lab be sure that you use a paper bag with a plastic liner so that moisture will not leak out and make your mailing label unreadable and undeliverable. After you have received the results from the lab, you can prepare and add to your soil for proper cultivation and for creating the garden that will present you with the best vegetables or flowers!