Soil Buffering

[Sunny747]

Hey KK,

i also live in the UK and my tap water's pH is about 7.8, you know i'm an organic, soil-grower.

Once my water is 'nuted' the pH is 6.8 and the run-off is 6.4.

Plant Magic, the company i buy compost and nutes from do hard and soft-water versions of their compost :

http://www.plant-magic.co.uk/products/supreme.html

Since using their compost i haven't had to worry about pH.

Unfortunately my water provider (Severn Trent) now put chloramine in the water supply, which is chlorine and ammonia, they even tell you on their website not to use chloraminated water in a hydroponics setup !

I'd advise a few tablespoons of dolomite lime in your compost, mix it two weeks or more before planting time, fill the pots with the mix and presoak them to get the micro-organisms going.

With a healthy organic soil mix and average UK tapwater plus your organic nutes your pH should be okay.


All the best,

steely

I was thinking about all of this earlier today. We're often told to add dolomite lime to our soil to buffer the soil, but as I understand it, lime (not sure what form) is used to sweeten or raise ph of soil in some instances. If this is the case, my thought is that the lime would work to alkalize the soil while it's natural components such as wood chips break down and become acidic over time. So if this is right then adding dolomite would not help with already high PH soil.

I probably have this wrong as 50 years of growing experience on this site and many others definitely say to use lime. Can anyone explain this further?
Thx

 

[steelrat]

I recommended the dolomitic lime just to ensure that there is high availability of calcium and magnesium.

KK i have over a gigabyte of growing books/botany books, one of them goes into great detail regarding deficiencies and surpluses of nutes.

PM me if you want the link.


steely