# My soil test results



## 01redcrew (Jun 16, 2017)

What do you guys think of my soils tesf


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## Suburban Jungle Life (Mar 1, 2018)

Overall, I'd say it looks good. Fertilize with N and K. Try to avoid using P. I find their recommendations to be a little confusing as to why you would want that much K vs N based on the results but either way, stick with N & K fertilizers.


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## ken-n-nancy (Jul 25, 2017)

Just two things to mention here that I don't like about Soil Savvy test reports... (a) their recommendation for your lawn includes application of 21-0-0 for nitrogen, and (b) their recommendation for 0-0-60 to supply potassium.

A: 21-0-0 is ammonium sulfate, which is an acidifying fertilizer. It would be *exactly *the right thing for you to use *if your pH were up above 7.2* or so, as it will help (very slowly, mind you) to lower pH over time. Alas, at your pH of 6.48, ammonium sulfate will tend to want to move your pH in the wrong direction.

If I were you, I would seek to make most of my nitrogen applications via either Urea (46-0-0) or Milorganite. Urea would have the benefit of not containing any phosphorus, which would be consistent with Suburban Jungle Life's advice to avoid phosphorus.

Personally, I wouldn't be worried about the phosphorus in the Milorganite as long as you apply in such a way that the Milorganite is not subject to runoff from your lawn (which you should be doing anyway), as the phosphorus in Milorganite is in a non-leaching form. (See https://www.milorganite.com/using-milorganite/non-leaching-phosphorus ) If you can't apply fertilizer to your lawn in such a way that it doesn't run off into storm drains or bodies of water, then you really shouldn't be applying fertilizer to your lawn at all!

B: Rather than use 0-0-60 (muriate of potash, aka potassium chloride) as recommended on the Soil Savvy report, I'd use 0-0-50 (sulfate of potash, aka potassium sulfate). Sulfate of Potash is a little more difficult to find than Muriate of Potash, as it is kind of a specialty product for lawns and is slightly more expensive. (Although it is the potassium source that Scotts uses in their lawn fertilizers.)

You won't find sulfate of potash at big box stores; you can get it at most garden centers. I get mine at Agway, which is a northeastern supplier. In Indiana, you'll have lots of farm suppliers who will carry it. I would make one application now at a rate of 1#K/ksqft (which would be 2# SOP / ksqft) and another application 30 days later, but no later than Sept 15th for Indiana. Late-season applications of potassium to cool season lawns have been implicated in increasing the likelihood of snow mold in some research studies.


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## 01redcrew (Jun 16, 2017)

Thanks. I'll check my local coop and see what they have. I'm guessing it wouldn't be a good idea to use the Scott's started with weed preventor this fall when I seed my back yard that I nuked off?


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## ken-n-nancy (Jul 25, 2017)

01redcrew said:


> Thanks. I'll check my local coop and see what they have. I'm guessing it wouldn't be a good idea to use the Scott's started with weed preventor this fall when I seed my back yard that I nuked off?


Some would argue that it shouldn't be necessary to apply a high-phosphorus starter fertilizer with a phosphorus level as high as that in your soil test. However, there is an opposing school of thought that new grass seedlings always benefit from a starter fertilizer with readily-accessible phosphorus due to the baby grass roots not penetrating deeply into the soil.

I'm not familiar with scientific studies that compare the rate of establishment of grass seedlings in a soil with a particular phosphorus level with either no starter fertilizer or a starter fertilizer being applied. However, such tests must have been performed in recent years with all of the public attention to overuse of phosphorus fertilizers. Maybe some others here can point us to such tests?


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