Common Mistakes To Avoid When Making Soil More Acidic

There are many factors you need to keep in mind when ensuring your garden soil is a perfect home for your plants. One of the most essential is your soil's pH. While some plants are tolerant of a wide range of acidity levels, others, like blueberries and their relatives, are far more particular and require acidic soil to thrive. Fortunately, there are ways to make your soil more acidic for your plants. It's important to avoid common pitfalls when acidifying your soil though. Some of the worst of these include not testing or not understanding the pH of your soil before adding acidifiers, using too much of your acidifying product or expecting instant results, and falling for myths that claim you can use products like pine needles or coffee grounds to make adjustments.

It's always a good idea to check the pH of your soil, and it's absolutely essential to check it before putting in any amendments to try to acidify your soil. Measuring the pH of your soil isn't difficult, but it is important to understand a few things about pH to be able to make sense of your reading. A neutral pH is considered a 7, and readings lower than that are considered acidic. Numbers higher than 7 are considered basic, or alkaline. If you don't check both the preferred range of your plants and the acidity of your soil before you begin amending, you could easily make your soil more acidic than your plants can handle. 

If your soil test shows that your soil is too basic for the plants you're trying to grow, your first impulse may be to add as much sulfur or other acidifier as you can to try to quickly fix the problem. This isn't the best strategy though, as it takes time for sulfur, one of the best and most popular products for acidifying soil, to work. The last thing you want to do is overshoot your plants' preferred pH, forcing you to then add lime to correct your mistake and lower the acid level. Instead, check the label on your acidifying product and don't add more than is recommended. 

Patience is essential when acidifying your soil, because the process requires microbes to slowly turn the sulfur into sulfate. This generally happens more quickly in spring and summer when the microbes are more active, but even then, it is not a fast process. In some cases it may even take up to a year. If you are using an acidifying nitrogen fertilizer to lower your soil's pH, then it could take even longer to see results. 

There are plenty of tried and true products on the market for acidifying gardens, including elemental sulfur products like Espoma Organic soil acidifier. However, there are also a lot of myths about how to acidify your garden soil. One of the most popular is that you can use coffee grounds to make your soil more acidic. While there are some benefits to  using coffee grounds to your garden or compost in moderation, a lower soil pH isn't one of them. Coffee itself is somewhat acidic, but used coffee grounds actually have a nearly neutral pH. Don't worry, they're still a great addition to compost bins. Just don't let your compost become more than 20% coffee grounds. 

Pine needles are also commonly, but incorrectly, believed to make soil more acidic. Pine needles can make a great mulch in the garden, but despite being somewhat acidic, they won't make a meaningful change to your soil pH. This is because as they break down they become less acidic thanks to microbes, which neutralize their pH. It's best to stick with well-tested products for acidifying your soil; your blueberries will thank you.