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Skeptical about that $12 soil test kit from the hardware store on 5th, turns out it was dead on
I figured the cheap test strips were junk so I sent the same dirt to a lab in Ames for $28, and both came back saying my garden soil was sitting at 6.4 pH, so now I want to know if anyone else has tested cheap kits against real lab results and gotten a different answer.
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kevin_harris7823d ago
Tested one of those cheap kits a few summers back when my tomatoes were looking rough, and it said my pH was around 7.2, so I dumped a bunch of sulfur in like an idiot. Couple months later the plants were still sad and I finally paid for a real lab test, which came back at 6.1, meaning I had just made the problem worse for no reason. What got me wasnt even the pH part, it was the nitrogen reading on the strip. It showed low, but the lab said I was fine, and I had already bought fertilizer I didnt need. So my take is the cheap kits can land close on pH by luck but the other numbers are all over the place. That $12 strip saved you $28, but it can cost you a whole season if you trust it on everything.
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