How to Test Your Soil for Nutrients

What's up guys, Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Another video today, we're doing how to test your soil for nutrition. So if you saw the video that I posted on Monday, it was how to test your soil for pH, which is important for sure. But even if you have perfect pH and nothing for your plants to feed on in your soil, you're still out of luck. So here's what we're going to need. We need distilled water. And the reason we're using distilled is because you don't want the water to have any effect on the tests. And speaking of the tests, what I use is the RapiTest soil test kit. It's like 10 or 15 bucks on Amazon. Very, very cheap. I'll put a link in the video description. Comes with the pH test and nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium tests, which are the main three macronutrients that a plant needs. Second, we will need a trowel. We've got to dig some soil out. And then something to put the soil and water mixture in. So let's talk about this for a second though. Why do we want to make sure that our soil, especially if we're planting outdoors in a place that maybe we haven't planted before, why does it matter that much? Well, you might have a ton of nitrogen in your soil and no phosphorus and no potassium or any combination of those three, along with the fact that the pH might be off. And if you need to check the pH, just watch my other video. It explains everything about that. So this is a way to get a baseline representation of what your soil is doing in your front yard or your backyard or wherever you're gardening. So you know what to add, what amendments you should add, what maybe you should not add. Because if you have a lot of nitrogen, you don't want to load more on. You want to just make sure and amend up the stuff that's missing. So that's why it's important. It's really cheap to do. And honestly it's kind of fun. You get to like relive chemistry class a little bit. So without further ado, let's head out into the garden and start digging. All right. So when we're digging out here, we want to make sure we get down below the surface. So anywhere from two to four inches down is a good idea. And again, with the RapiTest kit, I need about a cup of soil. So we're going to go ahead and dig down. Just dig a little trench out, see if I can get a good sample. All right, let's get that out of there. Let's scrape it up. All right, that should be pretty good. Let me just top it off. And now what we're going to do is hop back inside and go ahead and fill this cup up with water as well. So I'm going to dump this in. Go ahead and hop back inside. Okay, we have our soil. It's time to take our distilled water. And again, the RapiTest calls for one cup of soil to five cups of water. So let's go ahead and get that done. After we fill this up with water, we have to let this sit for probably at least a few minutes. We'll see how long it takes. What I'll do is I'll take a time lapse and show you guys the settling process just so you can get a sense of how long it takes for your soil to really settle out. But we need to cover this up, give it a good, good shake, and then go ahead and let it settle before we can do anything else because we definitely need the sediment to get to the bottom. All right, so there's five cups. I'm going to cut to a time lapse of this settling. All right, so I set the time lapse up for about an hour or so. And by the time I came back, it was still really cloudy. So I let this go overnight so that the soil could settle out. I guess that it took a lot longer than I thought, but that's okay. So we're here at the next step and what we're doing is we're going to uncover this and we need to fill up both sides. So you have this, which is the reference chamber, and then you have this which is the actual testing chamber. And the reason you fill up both sides is because this solution is a little bit cloudy. So we don't want the discoloration that's coming from here to color our perception of the actual test. So I'm going to fill up all three of these to the fill line on both, which is right about there. So we definitely want to have it above the highest reference mark. All right, they've settled and it's time to analyze the results. Let's start off with nitrogen. Looking somewhere between sufficient and surplus, although I would be skeptical, um, about it having a nitrogen surplus in my yard. I don't think that's actually the case. So I'm going to do a couple more tests. I'll do those off camera, but my official call here is somewhere between sufficient and surplus. Um, my, what my gut says though is it's actually somewhere between adequate and sufficient. All right, phosphorus. This is, there's just absolutely no phosphorus. Um, it's a mismatched color. I've done this test a couple of times. I'm effectively going to judge this as completely clear. So depleted or depleted in phosphorus. Finally, we've got potassium here. It looks like we are somewhere between depleted and deficient. I would not, uh, I wouldn't think we were even adequate with those colors. Maybe somewhere between deficient and adequate, but honestly depleted and deficient is my call here. So based on this information, we can make a call on what amendments we need to add to our soil. Here are RapidTest's recommendations on how you might amend your soil based both on the level of each fertilizer that you have and the type of fertilizer. So for nitrogen, dried blood or blood meal will work. So will nitrate of soda. For phosphate, you've got bone meal as an option. And I know a lot of people have had success with that and you have triple superphosphate. And then for potassium, you have myriad of potash. So there are a lot of options. I'd be interested to see in the comments, what you guys have used if you've noticed a fertilizer or macronutrient deficiency in your soil, because I'm always looking for new suggestions. And I know that the organic people have a lot of suggestions here as well. So this is it. This is how you test your soil and this is how you figure out exactly what it's missing. If you missed my video on pH, definitely go check that because if you have a out of whack pH, none of this stuff really matters. Let's say you've got a pH of nine. Well, most of your plants aren't going to be absorbing nutrients in that range. So finding out that you're deficient in nitrogen, for example, really won't matter because even if you weren't deficient, your plants won't, won't be taking that up. All right guys, that was the how to test your soil for nutrients video. Thanks for watching. Really appreciate it. And let me know what you want to see next by leaving me a comment. If you want to see more of this stuff, I'm trying to do Mondays and Thursdays now. So definitely drop me a like and a subscription if you want to be notified of those. And just a sneak peek of what's going on. We've got a tower garden going. We've got microgreens growing. I'm pruning a bougainvillea. There's a lot of stuff going on in this backyard. Stay tuned and happy gardening. Kevin out.