Testing soil for top results

Check the pH and nutrient levels of your soil

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TESTING your soil may sound off-puttingly scientific, but it is a cheap and effective process that helps you determine the acidity/alkalinity of your soils and what nutrients are in it so you get the best results from your plants.

It can also stop you buying the wrong plants for your plot, saving you money, frustration and heartache in the process.

Winter is a good time for testing as soil will probably have been lying fallow during the dormant weeks of winter, so the test results should be ‘pure’.

Test kits are widely available online and from garden centres. There are extremely simple ones where you put a small scoop of soil into a tube of solution, shake it and wait for it to settle to reveal the acidity or otherwise of your beds.

Others are slightly more complex and enable you to assess nutrient levels around the garden and attend to areas where they are lacking.

I don’t need a test to tell me the acidity or otherwise of my garden. The soil is so alkaline that large lumps of chalk often work their way to the surface of the borders.

Plants that thrive include foxgloves, lavender, cistus and potentilla, agapanthus, echinacea and aquilegia.