Found a local yard selling a nice finished potting mix for $38/yd3. I have 8 yards on for delivery Wednesday...the issue is the soil is slightly alkaline. My question for all of you is how you would go about affordably ph buffering that much soil? My current thought is mixing in 40 lbs of dolomite lime as I wheelbarrow it into the back yard.
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soil How would you amend 8 cubic yards of soil?
- Thread starter coloradoSun
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horse poo , pine / oak leaves , clean wood ash , lots of coffee grounds , 
Adding dolomite lime will increase the pH-- make it even MORE alkaline-- so don't do that. Peat moss and spent coffee grinds are good, cheap ways to potentially drop the pH. How high, exactly, is the pH of your new soil?
They stated the ph as being around 7.5-7.7
Sorry about all those typos in my previous post. I edited it for clarity.
You're shooting for 6 - 8pH, probably in the lower half of that range, ideally. Mix some peat in, see how it goes. 7.5 will most likely be fine, though.
You're shooting for 6 - 8pH, probably in the lower half of that range, ideally. Mix some peat in, see how it goes. 7.5 will most likely be fine, though.
Thanks for the input! Here I was thinking my plants would really struggle in the higher ph soil, but I have more confidence now that I wont have to go to such great lengths to alter things. I'm running 8 gallon fabric pots this year insead of 5g buckets in hopes of yielding better and I really didn't want to bottleneck the plants in any way. Especially at a base level like ph.
Heres a pic of the ph test i did at home here. Looks like it verifies some alkalinity to me, but I had a hard time really telling much difference in the green shades on this test. I will probably run another test just to make sure.
