 We're going to talk about soils. A good garden starts from the ground up. And here to teach us tonight how to test our garden soil and test it accurately is Chris Augustin, a soil health specialist based out of Minot. Welcome, Chris. Please go ahead. All righty. Thank you, Tom. Everybody hear me fine? Not so much? All righty. Is that better? OK. Thank you, everybody, for coming today. I'm a soil health specialist at the station at the North Central Research Extension Center in Minot. I apologize if at any time I don't make sense. I have twins that are three, so it's been three years and three months since I last slept. So we're going to talk about garden testing soil, what those numbers mean, as well as a study that I recently completed that compares a handful of different tests that are available. So with soil testing, there's a handful of certified labs in North Dakota. NDSU soil testing lab does do that in Fargo. There is egg vise labs over in Northwood. And then there's egg soil science over on the west side of Minot that can perform any of these tests that I'll be talking about tonight. So with soil testing, we're going to be digging in the ground. And the first thing I want to iterate is if you don't know where your utility lines are, please call 811. That way you know where stuff is so you don't mess some infrastructure as well as you keep yourself safe. So when you're collecting a soil sample, in most instances, we're worried about that top zero to six inch depth. Collect six or so samples just with a hand trowel is fine. You want six or so. I usually mix mine in a coffee can. And then when you put it into a bag like this, all you need is about a pint of soil so it isn't much. If all your garden is looking pretty good, I would just send in one composite sample. If you have a bad area of your garden, I'd collect some samples from there, send that off separately, as well as the good portion of your garden. Or if you have a good spot on your lawn versus a bad spot on the lawn. That way you can see what's going on between A and B. And I'll give you a better idea of what's going on. So when you collect that sample, we're worried about soil. Not grass, not debris, not tough, anything like that. So you want to remove that stuff. Like I said, you put in six or so samples. You put it in a coffee can, mix it up, put it in the bag, and send it off to the lab. Then you're going to want to fill out that lawn or garden information sheet. And so this is what that sheet looks like. Up at the top, there's that routine soil check where it'll test for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pH, soluble salts in organic matter. Nine times out of 10, that's really the only test you need to worry about. Don't worry so much about the micronutrients. It's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that I'd be most concerned about. At the bottom portion where it says background information, if you click where it says sample identification, that's just however you want to put it. If you want to call it Paul's Garden Good and Paul's Garden Bad, that way when you get the samples back, you know it's where it came from. At the bottom of the sheet, it does have some things where you can put down, is it full sun, partial sun, poorly drained, things like that, and it'll help the soil tester give you a better recommendation of what needs to be done if they were to find some trouble with that soil test. So out of all those big tests, like I said, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are important. pH is important because certain plants will grow in acidic conditions and some will do better in alkaline conditions like blueberries. They need really low acidic pHs. And that also affects nutrient availability as well. There are several labs outside of North Dakota. If you use one of those labs, make sure they run what's called an Olsen phosphorus test. There's three or four tests that can be run to determine phosphorus levels. And the Olsen test has been found to be most accurate in North Dakota. All the labs will run that, but if you send it out of state, they might run a different test that could give you some issues or may not give you that true value of what's in your soil. So this is just a general guideline for fertilizer applications. We'll get into how do you determine application rates a little bit more. If you want my presentation, I see people in mind to have those already printed out. Drop me an email and I will be more than happy to send that stuff to you. So basically for our gardens, both high ponds of nitrogen per thousand square feet is good. Same thing with phosphorus and potassium. If your pH is like six or less, it might benefit from some lime applications. Be careful, you don't go crazy with it. I've seen some instances where gardeners have put on too much and they pretty much sterilize their ground. If your organic matter is less than 3%, adding some compost, peat moss, something like that can help improve those numbers. Organic matter does a lot with fertility, but it also helps a lot with the physical characteristics of the soil. Infiltration, water holding capacity. If you're like me and you like to go to the lake for the weekend and it's gonna be a hot day in July, you'll get a couple more days where you don't have to be so worried about watering. That soil is frequently, if you have some good organic matter in there. Then EC, that's electrical conductance. That's the test that we use to determine if the soil is saline or not. If you're gardening and that number's over one, it definitely could be problematic and you could have some drainage issues and you might wanna think about moving the garden to a different spot or maybe raise beds something along those lines. Okay, so how do you pick a fertilizer? Well, all fertilizer labels are the same thing. On this picture, it says 10-10-10 and it always goes percent of nitrogen, percent phosphorus, and percent potassium. It's always in the same order. And usually on the back, it'll tell you exactly how much is there, different forms of nitrogen or different forms of phosphorus, those sorts of things. Okay, so to give you an example, a common fertilizer is 46-00. So that has 46% nitrogen. Another common fertilizer is 11-52-0. So that has 11% nitrogen, 52% phosphorus, and 0060 would only have 60% potassium. And so when it comes to different fertilizers, generics are fine, the name brand stuff is fine, the plants don't care if you use this one or that one. They really only care that you put the right amount down at the right time, excuse me, and at the right place. So then when it comes to composts and minners, they definitely get a lot of fertilizer value to the soil as well as organic matter and they're nature's slow release fertilizers. So it does take a good chunk of that growing season for that stuff to become plant available. So applying that in the spring could maybe reduce the need to fertilize throughout the growing season. Okay, so here's a quick example on how you would determine a fertilizer application. So you send your sample in and it says you need 20 pounds of nitrogen and five pounds of P205, that's phosphorus, per thousand square feet, you don't need any potassium. So these fertilizers, the 24, 8, 16, and the 13 double O are just some generics that I found browsing one of our retail stores the other day. So you need that 20 pounds of nitrogen, five pounds of phosphorus for a thousand square feet, but you only have a raised bed garden of like 100 feet. So it's a 10 by 10. So to determine fertilizer, I always do phosphorus first because there's always some nitrogen with it. So you take how much is needed divided by the analysis. I know I got five pounds of nitrogen needed, that should be phosphorus, that was my mistake, but it'd be five pounds of phosphorus divided by 8%. So you need 62.5 pounds of fertilizer. That's across a thousand square feet. So you gotta factor that in. We're only talking about a 10% of that area. So 62.5 times 0.1 that comes out to, you only need 6.3 pounds of that specific fertilizer in that raised bed garden. But there's also 24% nitrogen. So 6.3 times 24% gives you another pound and a half of nitrogen. So 30 pounds of nitrogen is what you need for a thousand square feet, but we're talking with a smaller area. So it comes out to three pounds. We're already putting on one and a half from that phosphorus. So three minus 1.5 comes out to one and a half pounds of nitrogen, it's all we need to worry about. So 1.5 divided by that 13% from that nitrogen fertilizer comes out to just another 0.2 pounds of fertilizer. So this mix would have 0.2 pounds of 1300 and 6.3 pounds of 24816 and you're adding a pound of potassium. Okay, so with nitrogen, it's a really leaky nutrient. When you're putting that down in the soil, be sure to incorporate it shortly after you put it down or water your garden very generously afterwards. Research would suggest that you need at least a half inch of rain after a surface application of like a urea to get that into the ground. Otherwise, a good chunk of that is gonna be lost to the atmosphere. Nitrogen is just, it's a very leaky nutrient. Okay, so that's soil testing and coming up with fertilizer recommendations in a nutshell. So I'm gonna talk about this garden test kit comparison study that I just finished up. So with these certified test labs, the egg vices, the egg soil science and NDSU testing lab, the tests that they run have been scrutinized by extension and university as well as lab test personnel for a number of years. And we use these tests because they seem to be the more, they seem to give the most accurate results for us to see a response from that fertilizer application. But with these garden testing soil kits, they're nice because you can pull some soil, you can do a test and 30 minutes later, you have results so they're quick. So there is some benefit with that. They can be relatively cheap. One of the tests that I ran was like $10 and I could test nitrogen 10 times, phosphorus 10 times, pH 10 times versus sending it off to NDSU, that runs about 20 bucks. So they're a little bit cheaper and quicker. But my question was, is there a difference between the garden test kits and a certified soil testing lab? And so to do that, we collected 14 samples across the state. So all of these different words, Forman, Mandan, Heimdall, Spia, Barnes, those are soil series that are very common throughout the state. So we collected six samples, three of them went off to the soil testing lab to be tested and then I kept three and I ran the various soil testing kits. So we got some replication, I could run statistics on this. On top of that, I also bought some store bought potting soil as well as some composted manure. Cause I know we got a lot of that stuff in our gardens as well to see, is one better than the other for a certain soil series or what have you. So if you see that map and you're trying to figure out, while I'm close to mine it or wherever, what soil type I have, there's the web soil survey, which is a handy tool, but you can also download this app for your phone called Soil Web. You go out in your backyard, you turn on your GPS, you hit the little button that says get my location and it'll tell you the soil series and all the different features in that that should be present. So that can give you a good idea of what type of soil you actually have. This is just for your reference, if you're curious about more soil testing, don't hesitate to call me, but this is the book that we derive all of our soil testing procedures from. So the first test I'm gonna talk about is the Luster Leaf Wrappy Test. I'm just gonna call this one Wrappy Test here on out. This is one of those tests that was pretty darn shot this kit for $10 and I could run the pH 10 times, phosphorus 10 times, all that sort of stuff. I collected the soil, there's a line about halfway up, you fill it with soil and then you fill it up another three quarters of the way with some distilled water and then it comes with like a little aspirin pill that you break in half, pour it in, shake it up and you wait about 10 minutes for it to turn a specific color and then you just compare the color versus the color insert. So it was a pretty straightforward, easy test to complete and like I said, it was pretty cheap. Another test that I did is this Lamotte Complete Soil Test Kit. This one is a little bit more, there's a few more steps than just putting a pill into it and waiting for it to turn a specific color. This actually uses an extraction process like we would do at a soil testing lab. So I think it kind of mimics the soil testing lab a little bit more. So you add this extraction solution, you shake it up, you let it sit for 10 minutes and then you would suck some of that liquid out, put in another test tube and then you put another chemical in it, shake it up, let it sit for 10 minutes and then you take your readings. This is the phosphorus test for that. Then the last one I compared was this Luster Leaf Rapid Test Four-Way Analyzer. I'll just be calling this the Four-Way Analyzer. The instructions in this one, say to water your garden good and come out and you just stick the probe into the ground, you want half an inch or an inch of space yet of the probe and then it moves the dial that says if it's high fertility, low fertility, you can flip the little switch to determine if it's adequate moisture, your pH. It also has a photosensitive or some sort of meter up on top that senses daylight so you can determine if you have adequate sunlight or not. I didn't do that part. I just looked at fertilizer and pH for this probe. Okay, so when everything was said and done, I took those 16 samples, averaged them out from the NDSU soil testing lab and then I compared it individually to each soil test. So I ran what we call a T-test. The numbers with stars would indicate that there is a difference from the NDSU test to that specific garden test kit. And so for pH, the Lamott and the Wrappy Test had similar results. The Four-Way Analyzer did not. It underestimated the pH. For nitrogen, the Lamott and the Wrappy Test were both statistically significant. I know when you look at it, you see 46 pounds for that NDSU test versus 49 for the Wrappy Test or 31 for the Lamott Test, but we call them statistically similar. Whereas that Four-Way Analyzer was extremely low at 8.8. The phosphorus, only the Lamott soil test was accurate. There's about 10 parts per million difference. And then when it came to testing potassium, there was no test kit that gave similar results to what the NDSU soil testing lab results were. And so just breaking it up into those 16 different soils, sometimes the tests work for different soils and sometimes they didn't work for other soils. Of those 16 soils, 11 pHs were the same with the Lamott, seven with the Wrappy Test and five with the Four-Way Analyzer. With the Nitrate, 10 samples were similar with the Lamott, seven with the Wrappy Test and only two with the Nitrate. When it came to phosphorus, just a little bit less than half of those Lamott tests were the same as the NDSU soil test and three for the Wrappy Test and nothing for the Four-Way Analyzer. Like I said, Pat, that was a very, I didn't see any correlation and there was only one soil sample from the Wrappy Test that had a similar number. So with your handouts, these are all those individual soils that I showed on that map. I'm not gonna talk about that. I just wanted you guys to see that. So if you're out in your garden and wanna see is this test okay for where I am, you have those numbers for you. So concluding that study, in some instances, the soil garden test kits provided similar soil test results to the NDSU soil testing lab. However, the garden test kits tended to measure less nutrients than the certified soil testing lab. So there might be a chance of over-applying nutrients using those soil garden test kits. One thing with the potassium is we naturally have a whole bunch of it in our parent materials. Because the tests stopped at X amount and we actually have more in our soil, that lowered the accuracy on all of those. So that could be a reason why the potassium didn't correlate well one bit. And there's a whole bunch of other garden soil test kits that are available. And I haven't come across any study like what I just completed that would say that test A or B are better. But with those different soil test kits, look at those reagents on there. Some of them have similar reagents or the same reagents that I already tested. So I would assume that you should get similar results to what I saw. So in summary, go out and soil test. It lets you know what's out there in the soil. You can over-apply, you can hurt your garden, you can under-apply and you're not gonna have those tomatoes in good old-fashioned BLTs in August. That'd be bad. That's my favorite part of the garden. That Lamott test kit appears to be the most accurate. However, the potassium was still inaccurate. Like I said, some of these garden test kits have the same reagents. That eco-concepts test, I saw that in a couple of retailers in the mining area. That had the same reagents as that Lamott test. So I'd expect similar results with that one. The rapid test, that was good for nitrogen and pH, but it didn't do anything for the phosphorus or the potassium. That four-way analyzer was different from all NDSU soil testing lab results. So like I said, there's some benefit. You can get a quick turnaround on that number, but they don't appear to be the most accurate. You can save a little bit of money with that, but NDSU garden test will run you like 20 bucks. So with that, are there any questions? Yes. Please type in your questions in the chat box. Chris, what was the name of that soil app again? It's just called Soil Web. Okay. It's put out by UC Davis. So if you have Google Earth, you can go to UC Davis and download that layer for your Google Earth as well. Google Earth is just a lot easier to run than Soil Web or Web Soil Survey. Excuse me. Chris, what is the price of the Luma test kit? That one that I got, that was like, I wanna say $60, but unlike the NDSU test or like the rapid test, I could run several pHs, several nitrogen phosphorus tests. Okay. How would you recommend testing for lead in the soil? How would I recommend testing for lead in the soil? I don't know if any- Do you think that part of the micronutrient testing that's offered by NDSU? Do they do a titanium and lead or heavy metals? I don't believe that the lead test is available. I'm sure there's an environmental lab someplace that would do it, but to my knowledge, egg vise or NDSU and egg soil science don't offer that. I've never seen it on any of their literature. If they send me an email, I'd be happy to do some digging and find that for them. Or maybe another university might offer that. That's possible too. Minnesota does soil testing as well. So I got a question here. Will NDSU test two areas of your yard per test or is that separate? That would be separate. Each sample would be the 20 bucks or the 1950, whatever it is. There was a gentleman here that had a question. What's your opinion of Mil Organite? Excuse me? What's your opinion of Mil Organite? The question is, what is my opinion of Mil Organite? I'm not familiar with that. I'm not familiar with that particular product. The Mil Organite is the Milwaukee sewage sludge. It's a common lawn fertilizer, it's organic and I think the formulation is 620, but it's a commonly used organic fertilizer for lawns. But it also can be used for gardens too, it's safe for gardens. Okay, one thing about that is a lot of those sewage type places, they do have a lot of lime that come out of it. So that might be a product that has some liming ability. So if you have a pH already of like 7.5 or something like that, that might raise the pH too high, but that's all speculation. I'd be curious about that. Yes ma'am. Can we use a horse manure on the garden? Can you use too much? Okay, the question is, they like using horse manure on the garden, can you use too much? My husband thinks more the better and I'm struggling now with something growing some more. Sure, so some of the things that could be going, so any manures, that's good stuff for the soil. The one thing I would want to be wary about is, there's some bad bugs that come out of the back end of the animal as well. Fall applications can improve food safety, especially if you're talking potatoes. If we're talking stuff that comes up out of the ground, you're not harvesting, it's much safer for that, but for tubers, now that's a different story. Can you put too much on? You can get to a point, when you look at cow manure, a lot of that is an organic nitrogen. When it comes to horse manure, there's a lot more urea and urine with that, I believe. So you could burn it like you would putting on too much urea. Okay Chris, we have some questions here from across the state. Is it too early to take soil samples for testing now, even though the soil is thawed? Nope, so if the soil is thawed right now, when you can go pull a sample, I would go do that right now. So we can lose nitrogen, nitrogen's a really leaky nutrient, it can leach to the ground and it can also denitrify. The denitrification process happens when soils are saturated and there's a special type of bacteria that come out of hibernation when there's no oxygen present in the soil. So that could be a concern, but because our soils are so cold right now, we don't have much biological activity going on. The biological activity is related to temperature and food and as well as oxygen content. If you went and took a soil sample right now, you're probably not gonna have much denitrified. I mean, you could lose a pound or two, but nothing that's gonna make or break you. You could have some leaching, but unless you're talking about a really sandy soil and you get a whole bunch of rain or you like walking out with your sprinkler every night, that probably wouldn't affect that number as well. Okay Chris, do you have any comments about biochar? B-I-O-C-H-A-R. Yeah, so biochar, essentially you take a bunch of logs and you burn it and then you put it in the ground. What it does is you're adding carbon to the soil and carbon is really the, we need protein, but carbon is how life is built. And so when you add biochar to the soil, you increase the carbon content. There's been a lot of work that shows that biochar can improve soil health with the biological activity, as well as it can mellow out the soil a little bit, so it might improve some infiltration and some compaction issues and some things like that. So there would be some benefit adding biochar, but if you got a whole bunch of peat moss or manure or compost handy, that's adding carbon as well. Thank you, Chris. We have some other products that we want your wisdom on. What do you think about Miracle Grow? The plants don't care. They just want that right amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. You know, some of these fertilizers have a slow release nitrogen to them and that can help prevent nitrogen loss. So there's some benefit with that, but if they care if it's Miracle Grow or whatever, at the end of the day, the plants, they're gonna suck up nitrate. That's the plant available form of nitrogen. So they don't care where it comes from just as long as the right amounts there at the right time. Do you have a general comment about green manure crops? Okay, so green manure crops, that's when you need plant like some sort of legumes, some clover, some alfalfa, something like that. And what it does is these plants, they can fix nitrogen. They have this relationship with bacteria. So 78% of the atmosphere that we're breathing right now is nitrogen. So with these nodules or the rhizobia bacteria, they suck up the nitrogen out of the atmosphere, turn into nitrogen that the plant can use. So the idea is you put that down and you're gonna get free nitrogen. Then you would till that into your ground and that's gonna release a bunch of nitrogen. So, excuse me. So you get a bunch of free nitrogen. Now, when you take your nitrogen test, we're testing for nitrate. The nitrogen is there, but it's in an organic form. So we're testing for a different type of nitrogen. So it takes time for that to mineralize and become nitrate that we're actually testing for and what that plant would utilize. When it comes to cash crops, if you see like a soybean field, we recommend a 40 pound nitrogen credit on that. Just because it doesn't show up on our soil test, but then next year, if we're planting wheat then the recipe calls for 120 pounds of nitrogen. I'd only plant 80 or put 80 pounds of nitrogen down because I'm getting that nitrogen credit from the previous crop. As for what to tell you for a nitrogen credit with Clover, I couldn't give you a guess, Tom. Okay, that's good. How about Chris, can you talk in general about as we prepare our soil samples? Like it's $19.50 per sample. So how do we decide how many samples we need to take in our backyard? Sure, so if I'm looking at my garden and everything looks pretty good, I don't have a sour spot or something like that. I would just want to send in one sample, but if I got a corner of the garden where it's always a crop failure, I would want to send in two samples. And the same thing, like if I'm looking at a lawn, if the lawn looks fine everywhere, just randomly a sample six or seven spots across the lawn. If I got a bad spot, I'd send in two separate samples from the bad spot versus the good spot. Okay, that's helpful. Does NDSU have a test for chemical carryover? Perhaps herbicide maybe? No, when we have those herbicide questions, there is a lab in South Dakota that tests for it. The NDSU weed guide has those recommendations in there. If you talk to your extension agent, they'd be able to show you the page and give you a lab number. There's four or five within a thousand miles or so of North Dakota and that book has a number of them listed. Okay, what you're feeling about worm castings? Worm castings are great. The soil is gonna love that. Vermicompost is good stuff. Getting back to the NDSU test, how quick is the turnaround time for those? You know, if you're talking peak time in the fall, it might be two weeks as well as, you know, if you could send in your samples right now, they probably aren't too busy yet because a lot of farmers or soil samplers aren't out in fields yet because they won't flow to pick up quite yet. So if you can sample it, now would be the good time. But, you know, when stuff gets busy and, you know, three, four weeks, I expect a couple of weeks for a turnaround. I had to go. Are we good? Yes, please. Okay, I had a question over here, Tom. Yes. How do we get some river water tested while are we finding what we need to. Sure, so the question is if you're irrigating with water, are you good with the soil test or should you test the river as well? I would wanna test the river. You probably aren't really putting much for nutrients on. I mean, you could certainly be putting some nitrogen down, but there could be salts in that river or sodium. And if you get too much of that on your garden, that can give you some issues down the road. Okay, there's a comment here that this gardener was told that potassium and phosphorus are persistent. They only need to be added once per year. Whereas nitrogen, you need to add it every two to three months. Is that true? Okay, I don't know about the frequency of adding nitrogen, but phosphorus and potassium, we don't lose that like we do nitrogen. Nitrogen can leach or we can lose it to the atmosphere through denitrification. Phosphorus and potassium do not have a gaseous phase naturally on earth. So the phosphorus you put down or the potassium you put down today will be there at the end of the year, unless hopefully the plant uses most of that because we wanna be efficient with our fertilizers. So unless you have some erosion issues, if you planted your garden, put a bunch of that stuff out and you had a really bad flood all of a sudden, that could certainly sweep away phosphorus and potassium because we lose that through erosion. But for the most part, that isn't a leaky nutrient like nitrogen. Okay, how about a question about gypsum? Let's say if you need to put calcium into the soil, but the pH is already above seven, would gypsum be a good soil amendment? Absolutely, in pretty much most cases in North Dakota, blossom end rock can be an issue, right? And so you put down some calcium and all of a sudden we've got BLTs again, right? What happens with that calcium? Okay, so limestone and gypsum both have calcium. Limestone has a high pH. We use that to fix low pH or acidic areas. So if you got a pH of like six or something, limestone would be probably a good thing to try to fix that blossom end rod issue. When your pH gets to seven or more, that lime won't dissolve in the soil. So gypsum dissolves easier in that soil solution. All these things have to dissolve into that soil solution to get into the plant. And so in most instances, I would wanna put gypsum down versus lime. I had one gardener in the area contact me last year and he had really bad blossom end rod issues. And so he went to the store and put a bunch of lime down. I did the math and he put down like 95 tons of lime to the acre and he sterilized that ground. So like I said, if you're putting some of that stuff on that's why a soil test is important so you know where you're at so we're applying stuff appropriately so we don't have issues like that. So in most instances, I would wanna use gypsum and not limestone. Okay Chris, you mentioned about adding limestone if the soil is very acidic in general. What do we do on the other hand if our soil is alkaline or if our pH result shows in alkaline soil? How do we modify that? Okay, so if your pH, so seven is neutral. If it's less than seven, it's acidic. If it's greater than seven, it's alkaline. And I said pH affects nutrient availability. If your pH is somewhere from six to like 7.5, you got a pretty good pH. Ideal for most things is 6.3 to 7.3. So unless my pH is like greater than eight or I wanna raise blueberries I'm not gonna get too concerned about trying to lower my pH. We can lower pH by doing that you have to add elemental sulfur. And what happens in the soil is it essentially creates sulfuric acid or that's battery acid. So there's this chemical reaction that causes that that decreases the pH. Now there's two different types of acidity. There's exchangeable acidity, there's active acidity. The acidity that I showed today is active acidity. Our soils have this buffering ability meaning they wanna maintain that native pH. And so you can certainly add a bunch of elemental sulfur to try to lower the pH. But if your pH is already like 7.5, 7.6, a year later it's gonna probably increase. Eggvice did a study a couple of years ago where they had a pH of eight. They added 10,000 pounds of elemental sulfur and they dropped that pH to about 7.5. Two years later it was back up to 7.8. Another thing to keep in mind is when acids and bases react there's always a salt as a precipitate, right? So you can, they actually, I bet they turned that ground white saline and they got some issues out there now because they tried to lower in the pH. But if you gotta raise back garden, give it a whole bunch of water and you can probably try to leach some of those salts out then that may not be so much of an issue. Really where I'd be concerned about wanting that acidic pH is if we're talking something like blueberries. Okay, and North Dakota will never be a blueberry capitals. That's for sure, that's why we have haz caps. Okay, how about Chris, how about you talk to these different soil kids? Where can we buy them? Um, so I actually ended up purchasing them all on Amazon but I worked at Monards for a year and I know that Eco Concepts test was there. I know the, I've seen them in Walmart, I've seen them in Home Depot, I've seen them in Lowe's. They're pretty readily available in most of those garden center type places. Kate, how about we just start winding it up here? There's a question about what are your thoughts about herbicide residual in manure? Okay, so there's really two herbicides that can be very tough on gardens if they make it through the animal. One is clopiralid and the other one is Eptam that is Tordon. Clopiralid is stinger. They're two common, excuse me, two common herbicides used and if the animal eats it, they don't decay when they come out of the back end of the animal. With clopiralid, usually it's a two or three year decay process with Tordon. It's probably about a five year process there. Tordon's usually used on ditches for noxious weeds and that. I mean, it's tough on leafy spurge, those sorts of things. And so if you're getting animal manure, you know, be mindful. Is it ditch hay or is it coming from an alfalfield or something like that? So there could be some potential. But if you know what went into that animal, you should know what's going out of that animal. Okay, last question. Chris, do you know, does NDSU test the water? Yes, they do offer water testing services. I couldn't tell you which specific tests they run off the top of my head, but if you go to the NDSU soil testing lab, they run a whole gamut of water tests. Okay, thank you, Chris. And those outstanding, thank you everybody for our forum for tonight. And we're gonna keep it going. We're gonna see you all next Monday night. Also remember, we covered a lot of information tonight. We record all these sessions. They'll be posted online within a couple of days. And you can just watch an encore performance so it all soaks in and you can learn more and more each time because we covered a lot of stuff today quickly. But thank you and we'll talk about trees and hydrangeas next week. See you next week.