 I am Chill East with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System and I will discuss how to interpret your soil test results. The soil test form can be found at this website or by contact in your local Extension office. The form has instructions for collecting and mailing soil samples. Be specific when listing the crops to be grown on your soil test form such as peas, beans, okra, squash. All vegetables do not have the same nutrient requirements and will not need the same fertilizer. The soil pH for vegetables should be in the 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 range. Read the comments at the bottom of your soil test report. These comments explain the amount of needed fertilizers for small areas. The comment may recommend one pine of a particular fertilizer per thousand square feet. You will need to multiply the length times the width of your plot to determine how much to add. If your plot is only 500 square feet and you needed one pine of fertilizer per thousand square feet, you will only apply half a pine of fertilizer to that area. This is an example of a soil test report. The sample designation is what you name the sample. If you only have one sample, you can simply call it garden. But if you have more than one side or plot, you can call it field one, field two. Name it something that you will remember when you get the results back. Be specific on the crop to be grown. Here it says vegetables, but if you say corn, peas, beans, you'll get specific results for those crops. Corn needs a lot more nitrogen than peas and I would not want to fertilize them the same way. The soil group is a type two. A type two is a loam or light clay soil. The pH is 5.3 and for vegetables we'll probably want a pH around 6, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 so I know it will call for additional lime. The phosphorus level is low at 23 pounds of phosphorus per acre. The potassium is medium at 161 pounds per acre. The magnesium and calcium are both high and we would not have to add additional magnesium or calcium but knowing that that pH is 5.3, I know it'll call for more lime and there are magnesium and calcium in lime so we will be raising those levels but that's nothing to be concerned about. So let's look at the recommendations. The limestone, one and a half tons per acre, 120 pounds of nitrogen is recommended per acre. 80 pounds of P2O5 or phosphorus and 120 pounds of K2O or potassium. This recommendation is actual pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium per acre. Not how many pounds out of a fertilizer bag. The numbers on a fertilizer bag represents the percentages of nutrients in the bag. A bag of triple 13 has 13% nitrogen, 13% phosphorus and 13% potassium. A 50 pound bag of triple 13 contains only 6.5 pounds of actual nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. A 50 pound bag of 34.00 contains only 17 pounds of actual nitrogen. At 34% about 3 pounds of 34.00 is equal to 1 pound of actual nitrogen. The amount of fertilizer needed can be calculated for large or small scales. We have a fertilizer calculator on our website that you can type in the recommendation from the soil test. In this case 120 nitrogen, 180 phosphorus, 120 potassium and type in the fertilizer you want to use and such as triple 13, the calculator will tell you how many pounds of triple 13 is needed per acre. If you have small plots, these calculations are already done. Look at the comment number two. Per thousand square feet broadcast three pounds of triple super phosphate. Triple super phosphate is 0, 45, 0 and you'll need one and a half quarks per thousand square feet. A pint of dry fertilizer weighs about a pound and you'll need three pounds and that is where you get the one and a half quarks. Per hundred square feet apply one and a half pounds of triple 13 at planting and side dress with one pound of triple 13. Comment number four. One ton of limestone per acre is approximately equivalent to 50 pounds per thousand square feet. If you need one and a half tons per acre, you should apply 75 pounds per thousand square feet. If you want to use triple eight, triple 10 or another fertilizer, the fertilizer calculator will help with the calculations or you can contact your local extension office. What if you want organic recommendations for your garden? Simply make a note on the soil test form that you would like to receive organic recommendations and that's what the lab will send you. Let's look at the comments. I would recommend using the fertilizer calculator to determine the amount of organic material needed. If you need 140 pounds of phosphorus per acre, you would need to decide what organic fertilizer you're using. If you use fish meal for example, which is 6% phosphorus, you would need 2333 pounds per acre. What if you don't have an acre? What if you only want to apply fish meal to 500 square feet? Simply take the amount needed per acre and divide it by the number of square feet in an acre, 43,560 to get the amount needed per square foot. Then multiply that number by how many square feet you want to fertilize. In this case, 27 pounds of fish meal per 500 square feet would supply the plant's needs. It would be a good idea to check on the availability of different organic products that are available and use their nutrient content to calculate the amounts needed. Don't worry about what something costs per bag. You should think about what things cost to fertilize your entire garden. Sometimes the products that cost the most per bag are the cheapest in the end because you use less of it. What if you have a raised bed or practice container gardening and you have a soulless media such as pine bark, peat moss, perlite, compost? You need to write on the form that this is a raised bed or a container mix. You'll get a report that looks like this. Here you can see the pH is 7.3, which is a little high. The electrical conductivity or EC, we call it, is the ability of a solution to conduct electricity. The more concentrated the fertilizer, the higher the number. The soluble salts is a measurement of the elements that may be in the bed or even in the irrigation water. Just looking at those numbers may be useless at just one time. You may want to look at them over a period of time, seeing that one number may be high, it doesn't tell you which element could be high. So you can't just decide, well, I need to fertilize because my EC is low, or I don't need to fertilize because my EC is high, you don't know which element could be high. If you measure the EC after a heavy rain, the EC may be low, or you could have a spike in it if you checked it after you fertilized. In this example, the EC, along with nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements are low, which does make sense. The nitrogen is two parts per million, and you can look at the range. We need it to be 120 to 200 parts per million. So you know from that, the comments over there, the recommendations is going to call for nitrogen. And you can look at the phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, they all look a little low, so you know we're going to need to add those elements. Take a look at comment number one, per 100 square feet in the spring, apply 16 ounces of ammonia nitrate, repeat the application as a side dress when the crop is up and growing. Comment number two, address the phosphorus and so on. Look at comment four and five. Recommends to add epsom salt and gypsum to raise the magnesium and calcium. Normally, we could add lime to raise those elements, but in this bed, our pH is 7.3, and we do not want to add lime. Epsom salt and gypsum would raise the magnesium and the calcium without raising the pH. Once you know how much to apply per 100 square feet, you can calculate how much to apply per raised bed or per container. Here's a link to the fertilizer calculators. These are easy to find if you visit our website at aces.edu and type fertilizer calculator in the search box. Using your soil pH, how to lower the soil pH, how to take a soil sample in a raised bed, how to take a soil sample in the ground. If you type any of these topics in our search box on our website, you should be directed to the information. The sew app and the farming basics app are great resources for the home or commercial gardener. Both of these apps are loaded with helpful information. The master gardener helpline is an excellent resource for gardening information, and I encourage you to call when you have gardening questions.