Kitchen Science

We have been thinking quite a bit about mulch these days.  We like to use mulch on garden beds to provide weed barriers, to hold moisture in the soil, and to add organic matter to the soil.  With a garden as big as ours, purchasing mulch can become prohibitively expensive, so we have been plotting about how to get free or low cost mulch.
It just so happens that we live next to a spruce/pine forest.  The forest has a great deal of leaf mulch available, but we have always heard that pine needle mulch is quite acidic.  We decided to test the leaf mulch for its acidity, and in the meanwhile test some of our garden beds for their ph as well.  In order to do this we found our electrical ph tester and calibrated it, and then tested our soils and a mixture of pine mulch and water.

forest

pine litter for mulch

So we did the testing and found some startling results.  The pine litter tested at 6.25 (about as expected).  The ph scale runs from 0 to 14 with 7 as the balance point between acid and alkaline.  I don't pretend to understand the science of the power of hydrogen (ph), but I do know that certain nutrients are more available to plants at certain ph's.  

kitchen testing

The really fascinating results were that our garden soil is alkaline.  We have been thinking for years that the soil is more on the acidic side.  We have been adding wood ashes and dolomite limestone to the soil on a haphazard basis for years, and came to find today that the different garden beds came in at 7.2-7.4.  This isn't bad, but just unexpected.  I do need to check some specific beds (like the new asparagus bed) to be sure that the ph is right for the specific crops planted various places, so more testing is in order.  Our rainwater today came in at a ph of 7.25.  Interesting stuff.