ph of soil.

Done it

As I grow vegetables and other things I try to have alkaline soil, so I was surprised at Len Phillips on line seminar, so I had a look around and found this, very interesting: THE TROUBLE WITH WORMS especially if you live in Pennsylvania.

Ekka

I wonder if Australia had worms prior to British Invasion?

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Done it

Oh, we had plenty. Even the world's biggest, the Gippsland giant, it's a bit warmer here than PA, but we didn't have: rabbits, foxes, asian mynas, privet, lantana OR cane toads.

TreeSpecialist

Check out the table on this link:

Chart of the Effect of Soil pH on Nutrient Availability

It's what we learned back in Soils 101 about nutrient availability.

pH Ranges from 6.0 to 7.8 will grow most things well. Some things like it a little more acidic while others prefer it a little more alkaline.

High or low pH ranges don't remove the nutrients (chemical elements) but rather bind them to other molecules making them unavailable to the plant.

The most common example of this around my world is iron bound up by calcium. By lowering the pH, I can free up some of the existing iron in the soil making it more readily available to the plant.

Compost is a great buffer for any soil and brings most soils into this range with little additional supplements needed.

I wouldn't pay much attention to anything Len Phillips writes.

JayD

That's pretty much what i'ved learnt about soils for a quick summary,Firstly know what ph(potential Hydrogen) your soil is,What type of soil it is,Then once you know what your dealing with adjust the ph slowly.

I cant comment on Mr Phillips as I do not know him.

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wulkowicz

Slipping in sideways for a post on soil testing, I've always been disturbed by us not looking at the larger picture for urban soils. In my life in Chicago, taking soil samples almost always meant that I was checking the contents of dump truck number 23, or 29, or 2, rather than getting a better understanding of the soil conditions for a particular tree. In trying to remedy soil conditions as a possible problem, it didn't seem to me that a few suggested samplings could truly be accurate unless I did some extra digging, pun intended.

Certainly, examining soil conditions is an appropriate and responsible part of helping with the well-being of a tree, but do we really do that in our present practices and taking relatively few samples?

I assume that any kind of reasonable additions of soil improvements should generally benefit the tree. If we want to fine tune that are searching out the soil causes of problems, it's possible to work away from some future improvements.

I would also assume that a tree with its roots buried in the contents of five different dump trucks soils would eventually redistribute available nutrients back inside the tree itself. But then again there is a generally one-to-one correspondence between the tip of a branch in its specific root in the ground.

Nature is indeed wet and sloppy and likely able to accommodate a deli mix of soils, but we need to be cautious about dogma masking physical truths. When we do what we're told to do, it doesn't necessarily mean it works; it just means we're doing what we're told to do and facts might arrive only as a serendipity.



Tubbs