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Spent $40 on a soil pH meter at Ace in Boise, it lied to me twice and now my tomatoes hate me
Bought this cheap green stick meter back in April because my tomatoes kept getting blossom end rot and I read that pH was the culprit. The thing has two prongs and a needle, no batteries, cost me $40 at the Ace on Fairview. Stuck it in three different beds and got three totally different readings, like 6.2, 7.5, and 5.1, all within ten feet of each other. I dumped a bunch of lime in based on that 5.1 reading and my pepper plants got all yellow and sad. Come to find out those cheap probe meters are junk and mostly just read moisture, not actual pH. My neighbor has a $200 lab kit and tested my soil for free, it was 6.8 the whole time. So I burned forty bucks and probably stressed my peppers for nothing. Anybody got a cheap pH test that actually works or am I stuck paying for the lab every spring?
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mark_hernandez124d ago
I did the same thing at the Ace on Fairview about three years back, dropped $35 on one of those green stick jobs and felt real smart about it too. I figured the needle moved so it had to be doing something, and I trusted it for a whole season. Then I sent samples to the extension office in Caldwell for $15 and the numbers didn't match at all, my "acidic" bed came back at 7.1. That was the day I stopped believing those things work. Now I use the little capsules you mix with distilled water, takes a few minutes but I can run four beds for under ten bucks. The lab test once a year is still worth it for the base line, then the capsules keep me on track the rest of the season. Forty bucks on a stick that reads moisture and calls it pH is a hard lesson, but you only pay it once.
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