When you are working in the garden, and hoping and working hard for all your vegetables to grow, you also have to consider what else they might need, maybe your soil isn’t as great as it could be. Being curious and the experimenting type we did some soil testing in our backyard. Not just on our soil in the backyard, but did the whole thing in the windy yard.
My oldest has now been “experimenting” with dirt and water on her own while outside playing. I love how one thing can spark explorations of other kinds.
Soil Testing Garden Science
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For the first part of our testing we started by using a soil test that we bought from a store, you can most likely find them at any garden center, or on Amazon. They really don’t cost a lot, usually under $8 from what we have seen.
With the store bought test it really is as simple as following the instructions on the package. The first part was testing the pH of the soil, and was over and done within minutes. For the other three tests you had to mix water with your soil and then let it sit for 10 minutes.
For the second part of our soil testing we did a DIY method that we basically just made up. We already had some pH testing strips (for our fish tank) and wondered if they would also work for our dirt.
Letting little fingers do the pH strip test didn’t leave us too sure of how well it worked on the first strip. Letting it re-settle helped for the second strip, and we could see the color change, but it wasn’t a huge difference, and quite close to neutral as the store bought test seemed to be.
I hope that my in-laws will be visiting this summer and will perhaps bring us a little Nova Scotia soil so we can redo this with that dirt and compare. And yes, I am actually hoping that my in-laws visit this summer and not just for the hope of dirt, can you imagine?
Do you take science outside? There is a lot to be learned out there, starting with soil testing.
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