Boston Residential Soil Testing

How Soil Testing Can Help You Plant Better
Why Test Your Soil?
Are you a homeowner planning to plant a garden or a new flower bed? No matter what you want to plant, healthy soil provides the critical infrastructure you need to ensure that your plants take root properly. It means the difference between lush lawns, beautiful trees, vibrant flowers, or yummy vegetables and a total lack of vegetation.

We offer soil testing Boston homeowners can trust. When you want to verify that the soil around your home is able to sustain the plant life that you’d like to grow, choose GreenHow!
How Does Soil Testing Work?
Soil testing requires the collection of soil samples, which undergo lab analysis. It is often recommended that soil testing is done on a bi-yearly cycle for residential customers. Once the soil sample is collected and analyzed, a report is prepared which covers the overall health of your soil.
What Do We Test Your Soil For?
There are many key findings that we test for when we are looking at the overall health of your soil. Your soil’s pH level, nitrogen content, and lead levels are used to assess your soil’s ability to sustain plant life. The combination of these factors are thus able to make the final determination of the health of your soil.

Why Use Our Local Lab For Soil Testing in Boston?

A local laboratory is familiar with the chemistry and the soil conditions of the local area, which means that we have the right expertise to service our customers in the Boston area.

There are many do it yourself kits on the market, but the metrics which you are able to obtain from these kits can sometimes be very limited, showing just the acidity / pH level and three major nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. This fails to give an accurate picture of the overall conditions of your soil. If you’d like to go the DIY route, be sure to check out our guidelines for doing your own soil testing so you’ll know what to look for in a soil testing kit.

Your Soil Tells a LOT About the Challenges You Face.

Treating a lawn, tree or plant problem without looking closely at the soil is a an easy way to waste a lot of time and money.  It’s a bit like gambling.  The right guess might be able to help your problem, but the wrong guess will just eat up time and money.  That makes customers frustrated and makes the service provider look bad.

At GreenHow we recommend a soil test every two years. For new customers, a soil test is an essential part of our service as it gives us the “green intelligence” to be able to put an effective plan together.  Soil test results reveal the chemistry of the lawn or garden.  In our experience, the main issues in New England are acidic soil, low calcium and low phosphorous. Using your soil test results we adjust our service programs accordingly.  Some amendments, such as lime and phosphorous, have additional charges and if your soil test shows a need, we will provide a quote for those services. We prefer to do corrective lime applications based on soil test results that dictate the amount and type of lime required. Lime comes in two types, calcitic and dolomitic. Calcitic lime is more expensive, but is often preferred for its source of calcium. We send our soil tests out to be done by the University of Massachusetts Soil and Plant Nutrient Testing Laboratory. Testing your soil is so important we have included instructions here how to do it yourself, just click here to go to our webpage on do it yourself soil testing.

Key Findings we look for in soil tests:

Soil pH
Soil pH is important to help the plant use nitrogen. Ideal range for turf grass is 6.5 to 6.9. For each point below 6.9, the available nitrogen for the lawn is cut in half.  This means that at 5.9 the value of one pound of nitrogen applied as fertilized is only one-half pound available to the plant.  Until the pH is corrected to allow the plant to use the available nitrogen, the plant like your lawn or ornamentals can only use half. To correct the soil pH, we recommend applications of the appropriate pelletized lime broken into maximum applications of 25 pounds per thousand square feet every six months. Lime can be applied any time of year, but is usually applied in the spring and fall. We recommend retesting every two years, unless a prior corrective liming program is still ongoing. We use use the Net Equivalent Value of the lime we are using to calculate how much is needed.  For example if the last soil test called for 150 pounds of lime, you need to determine the Net Equivalent Value of the lime you are using to determine how much you need.  Then divide by 25 pounds per thousand, which in the case of the lime we use would break into 6 applications taking 3 years to complete.

Phosphorous
Phosphorous is the next item we look at. Phosphorous is essential to root growth and can be lacking in New England soils. In Massachusetts a soil test is required to apply phosphorous to a lawn. This application is done between August 15^th and September 21^st, as the weather permits, when the plant will utilize it.

Organic Matter levels
Organic Matter levels are the amount of materials containing carbon in the soil. New England soil varies widely with former farmland having much high levels of organic matter than other areas. Soil is made up of a combination of sand, silt, clay, air, water and organic matter. Organic matter is the universal soil improver, helping the soil hold moisture and nutrients.

Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC)
The important Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) is a measure of the soil’s ability to hold and exchange cations such as potassium, calcium and magnesium. The Percent Base Saturation (below the CEC on the report) shows values for potassium (target 2 to 7%), magnesium (target 10 to 15%) and calcium (target 65 to 75%). By adding materials, we can maintain both the CEC and Percent Base Saturation of potassium, magnesium and calcium.

Lead
Lead is in all soil naturally.  In New England additional lead is introduced primarily by paint that weathers off or is removed from structures for maintenance.  This additional lead in the soil can raise lead amounts in the soil to levels of concern.  The Estimated Total Lead number from a standard soil test if over 300 should be a concern and may indicate a need for a Total Sorbed Lead test.  This pdf file is the University of Massachusetts Soil and Plant Nutrient Testing Laboratory Soil Lead:  Interpretation, & Recommendations.  University of Massachusetts Soil Lead: Testing, Interpretation, & Recommendation.