As autumn approaches, it is a good time to start thinking about your lawn soil pH so that you can add amendments if needed. Fall is a period of growth for grass as it prepares to go dormant for the winter and ensuring that the pH levels are optimal will help it stay healthy.
Test Your Soil First
You definitely do not want to just assume that your soil needs some sort of amendment. Plants grow best in a certain pH range and if you change the soil to be higher or lower than needed, your grass will struggle or possibly die.
A quick way to test is to buy one of the soil pH kits at a home improvement store or garden center. However, these are very simplistic and may not give you precise results. There are also soil pH probes available for sale in retail locations. These suffer the same flaws as home pH kits.
Your best option is to send off a sample to a soil laboratory. In addition to pH levels, they can also determine the type of soil present and the levels of important nutrients and micronutrients that are currently present in the soil. This information will help you get the right amendments and fertilizers for your grass. Here in New York you can send it off to the soil laboratory at Cornell University.
Steps for Preparing a Soil Sample
A proper soil sample requires that you dig in a few different spots throughout your lawn. You need to go down 3″ in your grass to make sure that you are reaching the levels where the roots will be growing. Take out a shovel of soil at the bottom of the hole and replace the grass.
Put all of your samples together in one container and mix it around. This will allow the laboratory to have an accurate representation of the levels present throughout your lawn. If you are sending it off to Cornell, they would like three cups of soil from this mixture to perform their tests. More information for ordering a sample can be found here.
Do You Need to Add Lime?
If tests show that your pH levels are on the low side (under 7.0 is considered acidic), you may need to add some lime to your soil to help raise the pH. The amount that you need will depend on what kind of soil is present and your current pH number. Refer to this chart from Cornell to see how many pounds per 1000 square feet that you should add.
If you would like help with these tasks, don’t hesitate to give us a call.
Image by photofarmer under a Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License
