Soil Testing & Amendments
The Foundation to Any Successful Turf Program
Our Organic Lawn Care Soil Testing & Amendments Program
The best lawn care programs begin with a soil test. Soil tests provide you and the professionals with key information needed to build an educated and customized lawn care plan. Soil tests tell what nutrients the soil in your property needs to be healthy and withstand the stressful parts of the season. With organic programs, the soil is the main source of nutrient uptake for your lawn. Soil testing is one quick way to assess your soil’s nutrient status and determine what amendments and services are needed for optimal grass growth and sustainability.
What is a Soil Amendment?
Soil amendments are any material that is added to the soil to improve its physical properties such as:
Limestone
Gypsum
Water Retention Products
Compost
Topsoil
We can determine the appropriate inputs of our products for organic lawn care by interpreting the results of a soil test. We test for the following:
- Soil pH
- Buffer pH
- Phosphorus (P)
- Potassium (K)
- Calcium (Ca)
- Magnesium (Mg)
- Organic Matter
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What Do You Mean by Services That Help the Soil?
Sometimes lawn care goes deeper than just throwing fertilizer and other products on your lawn to be uptaken by the plant roots. In order for our products to be available to the plant roots they must be able to travel to them. The most common way products are stopped from getting to the roots of your turf is caused by soil compaction. This issue will essentially make the soil around those roots very hard and impermeable. This will suffocate the roots not allowing oxygen to be taken in and causing serious growth issues, stress, diseases, and most annoyingly weeds. Services like Core Aeration will relieve your soil of compaction by pulling little cores out of the soil, allowing room for expansion, water, and oxygen flow into the soil.
Soil Testing
Pure Solution’s organic lawn care program begins with a soil test, which will give us key information to customize a plan that meets the soil’s needs. Soil amendments are used to maintain the appropriate nutrient levels and correct PH balance in the soil.
Many New Englanders will apply limestone every year without testing the soil to determine if it is needed, sometimes to the detriment of their yard. It is also essential to know how much to apply and what type, calcium or magnesium.
The Path Forward
As your test results come back our team of turf managers will analyze your results. Our team decides what organic products and solutions will work best over time to bring your lawn from its current state to a beautiful, green, lush lawn. If your lawn has been on a traditional lawn program, we will formulate a plan to transition your lawn off the toxic chemicals that have previously been applied.
We will send you a complete plan of optimal add-ons to improve your soil with precise application dates, watering and mowing advice as well as answer any questions you may have. The soil test is the most effective way to create an organic lawn care plan that is unique to your lawn’s needs.
How Often Should You Test Your Soil?
We recommend a test at least every year so that we can monitor any changes in your soils fertility. Things like salt damage from plowing companies and pine needles and tree leaves can affect your soil fertility. Depending on the state of your lawn we may recommend a test every year to help solve issues with a problem area or to see how successful our treatments are working and if we need to course correct as things change. Without a testing program your lawn care company is flying blind, they are simply treating what they can see with the naked eye and not addressing what is happening in the in the soil of your property, which is the area most critical to your lawn in an organic program.
