A soil test will give you the current state of nutrients in the soil that you plan on using for a food plot. For example, you may find out that you need little if any, fertilizer. By far, the most important component of the soil test is the pH level of the soil. The pH level in the soil will indicate the acidity or alkalinity of the soil. For the most part, everything that we want to plant for deer will grow the best at a neutral pH of 7.0, so that should be your goal when testing your soil’s pH and deciding how much lime to add to raise the pH level. Add enough lime to raise that plot’s pH to 7.0. The pH is really the environment that the plant has to live in. Many of the plants we want to grow for deer simply cannot germinate and thrive in low pH soils. To make this very simple, correcting the pH is as essential to these plants as having oxygen available for us. Simply put, if we don’t have oxygen available to breathe, we will die – so, if you plant species that need a relatively high pH level in order to grow, and you ignore testing the soil for the pH level and try planting and get poor or no results, it could certainly be that the pH is too low for these plants. Categories: FAQ
