Low Down on Dirt

Thursday, April 04, 2013

imageI saw this nifty little experiment to check our gardens dirt and I knew we would have to try it out! I needed to know what was going on in my garden with the dirt anyway. Turning this all into a homeschool project for the kids was just an added bonus.

Basically you scoop up dirt, add water and than either add baking soda or vinegar for the test. Soil Test ImageWoowho! Easy enough right? (Click on the image to the right here for more information about how you can perform this test.)

The kids had to figure out how to tell the difference between their soil samples, make sure they picked up samples from the same location and use the same amount of water/baking soda/vinegar on each sample. Eh… piece of cake!

It was fun to try this out and I’m glad we did. Apparently all my garden dirt is acidic. Now to amend that before my little seeding lovelies get kicked outside this year.

DirtCollage1
We did NOT do full mason jars for our experiment but we did adjust down amounts used for our tiny little samples (as best we could). We also used bottled water so that anything in our water wasn’t as prominent in the testing. We should run the test twice just to make sure it is true but from what I’ve read about acidic dirt in the garden, it seems spot on.


This is Letter D for my #atozchallenge
If you want to see more of the 
A to Z Blog Hop Challenge, click here!



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fun experiment! Good luck amending your soil -- I hear it's easier if the soil is acidic -- I have alkaline (basic) soil here and it's almost impossible to permanently amend because our water is also hard & alkaline and reverses any soil amendments over time. :(

Unknown said...

Hi Dee, another great A-Z post. Thanks.

J Lenni Dorner said...

Stopping by from the #atozchallenge !
@JLenniDorner

Thanks for that great tip!

Post a Comment

Anyone can leave a comment. Comments are fun!
If you do not have a google account, use the Name/URL for leaving a comment.
Thanks for stopping by!

PS - I do not use Captcha