Use Taylor ph test to test soil ph?

[Mdragger88]

I am definitely contemplating expanding my flower beds (which are filled with rocks) in some of the troublesome high traffic, damp, or shady areas.
Contender #1 - this area will likely never grow grass thanks to the shade from the house & the evil sweet gum tree so expanding it to line up with the concrete walkway is looking like the best option


Contender #2
The walkway to the pool & no, my deck isn’t aligned with my patio, I’m just thankful its sorta even with my house. The corner near the walkway had a little pool on it years ago - the grass has never been the same since. Also that strip is now shaded by the patio roof that didn’t used to exist. I am imagining rocks with stepping stones here if I can’t get grass (other than nut grass) to grow.


Contender 3: the back flower bed. Very high traffic, path between patio, water hose & garden. The hostas (when they haven’t been burned alive by the sun) get quite big & over take the pavers so we end up walking in the grass. It gets wet alot because of using the hose there. I also got a bit unwieldy with the liquid lawnmower & some spots won’t even grow weeds

 

[Newdude]

I vote all 3

I have 2k+ bricks left if you need any.

 

[Mdragger88]

Between my husband on large equipment & my kids on 4wheelers, go carts, & bikes keeping decent grass is an uphill battle.
All the gravel/crushed concrete on the google map pic was added a couple years ago when a deal on it came along. It was all grass before & it was a miserable mess! Our shop was almost unuseable/ inaccessible during rainy times. I am awaiting my lottery winnings so i can get another layer lol
I would love concrete in all those areas pictured above but all I have right now is washed gravel & $1 paver $$
All the paver edging was added a little at a time when they went on sale. There were rotted landscaping timbers there before. We’ve been working on our fixer upper for 10 years, hopefully we’ll be done by retirement

 

[JoyfulNoise]

+1 to all three options.

But I would go wavy and do some some really big freeform flower beds in a nice mound with lots of squishy mulch. Add lots of garden gnomes and solar lighting as well (unless you a nice landscape transformer nearby).

 

[Mdragger88]

+1 to all three options.

But I would go wavy and do some some really big freeform flower beds in a nice mound with lots of squishy mulch. Add lots of garden gnomes and solar lighting as well (unless you a nice landscape transformer nearby).

Wavy sounds fun but hard to mow around with a tractor . Also I am done with mulch hopefully forever. It floats & washes away/ gets everywhere & has to be constantly replenished. Medium washed gravel is my new friend. I have contemplated some low voltage lighting. I finally got some outdoor receptacles added in the last year so I could actually plug some in. The front is too shady so solar doesn’t work well there.

 

[phonedave]

Wavy sounds fun but hard to mow around with a tractor . Also I am done with mulch hopefully forever. It floats & washes away/ gets everywhere & has to be constantly replenished. Medium washed gravel is my new friend. I have contemplated some low voltage lighting. I finally got some outdoor receptacles added in the last year so I could actually plug some in. The front is too shady so solar doesn’t work well there.

Over the years I have brought in at least 10 yards of ground cover rock onto my 1/2 acre - some delivered, some with my trailer. Everything from plain old 3/4 clean grey gravel to 3" river rounds, Eastern Sunrise, and pea gravel. A propane torch works wonders for clearing weeds in rock (just don't light your neighbors decorative grasses and cedar fence on fire - ask my how I know that).

I do also have freeform rock edged beds with mulch. It is a pain, but it does look nice, I spray the weeds weekly with industrial vinegar, epsom salt, and soap. I try not to use chemical herbicides (my dog also likes to like them) . Plus I got a lot of shot rock for free when a friend had a large boulder removed from his property.

 

[jseyfert3]

Btw I have been through a few pH probes and my favorite so far has been the Blue Lab Soil pen. I use a short piece of rebar as a probe hole maker and push the probe into the hole. A few seconds later, I have a pH reading. And for those of you using distilled water on your probes don't do that whether it is your pH probe for your pool or one for your soil. It will draw ions out of the reference electrolyte through the glass in the probe. Rinse them with tap water and store them in KCl solution or I suppose you can just complain about their accuracy and reliability. This little tidbit is from a guy who had to learn the hard way... more than once.

Standard practice from what I've read is do test, rinse with distilled water, clean with cleaning solution (if needed depending on test done), followed by a rinse in distilled water to clean off the cleaning water, followed by storage in KCl storage solution. A rinse in distilled water shouldn't cause any damage to the probe.

Also nobody in this thread actually mentioned distilled water for cleaning or storing probes. A distilled water soil pH test is putting soil into distilled water and letting it sit for an hour or so like @JoyfulNoise said, then measuring the pH of the water, which is now the pH of the soil. It's NOT distilled water at this point cause you just added a ton of stuff to it. It's just a lot less convenient to do that a soil pH testing probe. But the upside is you don't need to buy an expensive soil pH probe just for testing soil if you already own a regular pH meter.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Personally speaking, I think soil testing is a bit of wild goose chase and not terribly productive. If you have an Ag Extension at a local college, get them to test it. But buying probes and chemicals to do it yourself is a waste of time. Soil is not like pool water. Soil chemistry can vary wildly even within a property line and it's pretty ouch regional thing. Once you do the testing, it is what it is and you are very unlikely to change the soil chemistry much. If you want to grow grass, then install whatever grass type you like and then water/fertilize the snot out of it to keep it green. If you happen to live somewhere where there is a native grass species that grows well, then grow that.

For example, we have very VERY alkaline clay soil here with sand mixed in and caliche (basically Portland cement) out the wahzoo. There is little to no organic matter in the soil at all and it has very poor tilth. The pH is very much at 8.0 and above and the calcium/magnesium levels are off the chart. Even if I wanted to acidify the soil, there's no reasonable way to do it. Sulfur won't work either because the intense heat and low humidity make the soil sterile to almost all organisms that would oxidize sulfur into sulfates. There is literally nothing you can do to change any of this on any large scale unless you're talking about tilling up the entire yard, stripping 8-12" of soil and replacing it with potting mix. Even then, it would revert to clay and sand within a few years. As I like to joke to people, if NASA or SpaceX were ever serious about studying how-to setup Mars colonies, they'd only need to open a few research stations in Arizona to do so ... my backyard is essentially the martian Solis Planum with a pool

 

[rstrouse]

In my case the house was built on compacted fill. Unfortunately, this is not great for growing the things that I like to grow. You are correct that some soils are not good for much of anything and require more amendment than soil. But with persistence you can change it. The environmental things like degree days and min/max temps are a lot harder and will limit what you can grow. Bear in mind they grow a whole lot of the food you eat down in the Imperial Valley.

I have multiple zones where I grow everything from sago, apricot, peach, nectarine, citrus, palm, blueberry, grapes, ornamentals, olives, and cypress. Each of these have their own nutrient needs including pH. In that space I have about 60 points that I test on less than an acre and they are all different. You can fertilize, irrigate, and supply micro-nutrients all you want but if they are bound up in the soil you will fail. I am not a lawn fan but I have some and it too needed some work to get to a point where it didn't require constant fertilization.

As for the distilled water debate. In the space of one round of testing, distilled water rinsing between points will cause the calibration to be off significantly by the end of the testing regime. Without it I can pick the probe up from the last set of tests and it will still match the standards. But you can keep using distilled water on your probes if you like. When calibrating the trick is to shake the rinse water out and dry the outside of the probe between testing standards so you do not contaminate your sample. For storage do the same thing and pop it into storage solution.

 

[Mdragger88]

We have a large garden too - it is obstructed by the large “home” pin in the google photo. Every year my husband throws what he assumes it needs in there to get it ready, before next planting season I will be having a soil test done on it & the grassy area near the house just adjacent to the pool/patio/carport. Currently, the grass near the carport/patio is the only place that should be growing well but isn’t & doesn’t have any obvious environmental factors hampering the growth like the other trouble spots in the 3 photos. It is the area I was mostly planning on fertilizing, possibly adding lime (depending upon ph) now & overseeing the barest spots in the fall if that doesn’t help. It’s strange because it is 99% weed free but it is just shorter & sparser grass in that area, it becomes quite noticeable when we haven’t mowed for a while.

 

[Katodude]

If it is bermuda and you want it to thicken. Mow often, water and fertilize. Push about .5 lbs of nitrogen a week for a few weeks.

 

[Mdragger88]

If it is bermuda and you want it to thicken. Mow often, water and fertilize. Push about .5 lbs of nitrogen a week for a few weeks.

It’s been soooo hot I have been worried I would fry it if I fertilized before now but we have some cooler weather & rain coming this week so I was planning on doing it before hand.

 

[Katodude]

Its bermuda, its very hard to kill. Water it, wait a day, mow it, then water it again. Wait a day, then fertilize.

For fertilizer I would put down some cheap 10-10-10 for now. Put down 5lbs per 1000 ft. That will give you your .5 lbs of N. Make sure you water it in right away.

 

[Katodude]

Then I would buy some Urea 46-0-0. I dissolve it and spay it with a backpack sprayer. Much more accurate and less likely to get nitrogen burn from it. I leave it on the grass for about 1-2 hours then water it in. Do that about 10 days after your 10-10-10 application.

 

[jseyfert3]

Personally speaking, I think soil testing is a bit of wild goose chase and not terribly productive. If you have an Ag Extension at a local college, get them to test it. But buying probes and chemicals to do it yourself is a waste of time. Soil is not like pool water. Soil chemistry can vary wildly even within a property line and it's pretty ouch regional thing. Once you do the testing, it is what it is and you are very unlikely to change the soil chemistry much. If you want to grow grass, then install whatever grass type you like and then water/fertilize the snot out of it to keep it green. If you happen to live somewhere where there is a native grass species that grows well, then grow that.

Specifically the reason I was planning on doing soil pH tests was for growing blueberries, or for other specific plant purposes. But I never got around to that. I'm not personally a fan of the perfect turfgrass lawn and monoculture, but to each their own. I had clover in my yard at one place I owned. A friend said I should spray to get rid of it. I said "I like the flowers. Bees like them. It adds nitrogen to the yard. Why should I get rid of it?" From what I've read, it was standard practice to have clover seed in lawn grass seed mixes prior to the 50's due to the benefits of clover, but this stopped when herbicide use on lawns became widespread, since the herbicide would kill the clover.

I've got friends who got a house with an acre of lawn in the country and they want to convert most of it to native prairie plants. That should be a fun project. It looks like they were surveying to replace a gas line and my friend said if they dug up the front of his yard to do that he'd tell them not to plant turfgrass when they were done cause he'd just plant native plants in the area they nicely got rid of his turfgrass for him.

 

[Mdragger88]

The one thing about a fairly weed free bermuda yard is that you don’t have to mow it every 5 seconds !
Ours would probably be more lush if we mowed more often but it’s not necessary for the majority of our property. Most of My neighbors start mowing at least a month before us & I feel like they mow some part of their properties almost every day or so. Everyone around me has at least an acre or more. It’s because weeds grow fast & it looks knarly quick! Also our grass goes dormant so after that, we spray the rando weeds with post emergent - no more mowing. This has been cost effective for us given the price of diesel & tractor repairs/equipment. We do our own spraying so it’s not nearly as expensive as it would be if we paid someone. The people we bought the house from used to have a lawn business so we rode for years on their successful ground work just putting a little weed & feed out on the parts around the house but it really wasn’t cutting the mustard with the bulk of the yard & we were having to mow alot which puts a strain on our 80’s shoestring model Yanmar. We were borrowing it in the early years but now we are it’s proud owners
Then we met my hubby’s bff who went to school for ag & worked for a farmer for several years so now we go in together @ spray time & do both our yards. They bond over herbicides
Our yard’s condition has immensely improved over the last few years. Only My husband mows with the tractor, I don’t operate it because I can barely push the pedals. He is much happier now that mowing isn’t his 2nd job. At our last house we had weeds galore & a riding lawnmower with about the same amount of grass to cut as we have now & we had to mow some part of it like every day or else we would end up having to borrow a tractor & a bush hog to get it under control. We even had goats - we had a pen that we would move around the yard with the 4wheeler. Keeping it up was a definite chore. I’m not really after perfection, just low maintenance. If u let it go too natural around here the snakes & mice will be all up in your crib.

 

[phonedave]

Specifically the reason I was planning on doing soil pH tests was for growing blueberries, or for other specific plant purposes. But I never got around to that. I'm not personally a fan of the perfect turfgrass lawn and monoculture, but to each their own. I had clover in my yard at one place I owned. A friend said I should spray to get rid of it. I said "I like the flowers. Bees like them. It adds nitrogen to the yard. Why should I get rid of it?" From what I've read, it was standard practice to have clover seed in lawn grass seed mixes prior to the 50's due to the benefits of clover, but this stopped when herbicide use on lawns became widespread, since the herbicide would kill the clover.

I've got friends who got a house with an acre of lawn in the country and they want to convert most of it to native prairie plants. That should be a fun project. It looks like they were surveying to replace a gas line and my friend said if they dug up the front of his yard to do that he'd tell them not to plant turfgrass when they were done cause he'd just plant native plants in the area they nicely got rid of his turfgrass for him.

I keep clover in my lawn for a variety of reasons. I also do not use herbicides. One, because overuse of herbicides are not good for the environment or people and two, my dog likes herbicides. If I spray something with an herbicide, he will go over and lick it. I use industrial vinegar and epsom salt for spot control of weeds in flower beds and gravel areas.

One added benefit from clover, aside from the load of pollinators that it attracts is that the rabbits like it. So much so that they tend to prefer it over eating my garden. I can have 4 or 5 rabbits at a time happily eating clover while not a single one goes into the garden. I think my dog has also brokered a truce with the rabbits. They don't go in the garden and he does not chase them. If they get close, he barks and chases them for about 15 feet. They run about 15 feet. Then he lays back down, and they go back to eating clover.