How to test your soil PH

Hi I'm Marcel and I'm here today to explain how to do a soil pH test. We all know that soil is critical to the success of our garden and pH is a large component of that because different PHS actually determine what nutrients are available to your plants

Some plants like a soil that has a lower pH some require soil with a high pH, so today I'm going to show you how you can test the pH of your soil so you know what you need to add to make it suitable for all your garden.

Testing your soil pH is really simple simply go to the garden bed you want to test and you need to get five samples from different areas of that same bed.

Now those samples shouldn't be on the on the surface they need to be about five to ten centimetres down so dig down you only need like a teaspoon from that area.

I've got my five samples here and I've just mixing them together so that it's a true indicator of that entire bed.

Once that's mixed up you simply put a teaspoon on a plate a little bit more maybe on a white plate to make it easier to see and you use the pH test to indicate a liquid. Put a few drops on to make it into a bit of a paste and mix it up.

Nice and moist like that and then you get the barium sulphate, which is like a white powder and this will change colour to indicate exactly what the pH of your soil is.

There we go and give it a few minutes and what will happen is that will change colour to let us know exactly what the pH is, this one is about 4.5, so we'll definitely need to add something to improve that soil add a little bit of dolomite to increase the pH and then we'll be ready for our veggies

So if you have a soil that has a very low pH and you need to raise it you'll have to add dolomite or calcium carbonate.

If you have a soil that has a very high pH and you need to lower that pH you'll have to add sulphur to the soil. The amount of either lime or sulphur you need to add will be dependent on your soil time but that's all included in the dig is pH test kit.