Soil Testing I Finally Did It! 2-12-2024

Soil Testing I Finally Did It!

After 7 years of vegetable gardening and 2 years of cut flowers, I finally did a soil test. I know, isn't that something I should have done at the beginning? Well, yes and no.

I live on Bainbridge Island; WA and our soil is glacial till - basically rocks with silt and sand with very little nutrients at all. So when I created my vegetable garden I did it with raised beds and bought compost from a farm on the Olympic Peninsula: Shorts Family Farm. Needless to say their compost was called Magic Soil, and it was!  My vegetables grew very well, and I didn't have to add fertilizer or anything, just top off with a couple of inches each year. That worked great, until it was no longer. The Short family sold their farm to the city of Port Townsend, whom I'm sure will do wonders with it eventually, but they shut down their compost making - and now I'm out of luck. I've tried to find comparable compost - and the closest I've come is Oly Fish compost - at $90 a yard - yikes!

Similarly, when I created my cut flower garden, I followed the no-till method by Charles Downing. I cut the grass really short, overfertilized it, laid down cardboard on the rows, and covered with garden soil and compost 6" deep. This killed the grass/weeds and gave me beds I could immediately plant into. Last year (2nd year), some of the dahlias didn't do as well as others, so I decided to do a soil test for both the veg and flower gardens.

I found this company online called Redmond Agriculture - probably not the least expensive, but they provide results in 5 days. I took samples from 6 different locations in each garden, mixed them together and took a sample per their instructions to add to the kit to send in.  Here are the results:

Vegetable Garden	Cut Flower Garden

What these results basically say is the Nitrogen is in the toilet - and a couple of minerals could be better. So the recommendation was to fertilize with "Feather Meal" an organic slower release 12-0-0 fertilizer to increase the Nitrogen. I also bought some Minerals from Redmond Fertilizer - their BUILD formulation mostly for the cut flower garden - but I put it everywhere. I will also probably buy some Borax and apply sparingly to up the Boron.

The soil test was $38.99 for each (free shipping) - price may change, and I'm happy with the recipe of knowing exactly how to amend my soil for this year!

Update in June: Both the veg garden and the cut flower garden are growing beautifully. I'm so happy with the results!!