Soil Test Showdown: Grow Bigger Plants! (Potting Soil Comparison) Full Video Linked in Comments

Join us at Soil Lab as we analyze various garden soils based on your recommendations! We’ll examine physical characteristics and amendments based on soil test results. See plant growth from Mother Earth, Vermont Compost, Gardener’s Supply, and more in this soil testing experiment! #SoilTesting #SoilAnalysis #GardeningTips #PlantGrowth #SoilLab #OrganicGardening #TomatoPlants #LettuceGrowth #GardeningExperiment #DIYGardening #SoiLab #MySoil

Hi, I’m Matt here at Soil Lab and I’ve read all your comments and we’ve got the next collection of garden soils based on your recommendations here that we’ve tested. I’d like to spend some time going through each of these soils today looking at similarities and differences, some of the physical characteristics, and then finally how I would have amended these based on our soil test results. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in. The soils that we tested were the Mother Earth TerraCacraft soil here. We had the Vermont Compost Company Fort V. We had the Gardener Supply selfwatering potting mix. The Detroit Nutrient Company Great Lakes Water Only as well as the Build-A-Soil 3.0 recipe. And you can see how they stack up in plant growth here. But let’s go ahead and talk just a little bit about study design and then we’ll get into those physical characteristics. In terms of our design, what did we do? How did we get this started? Well, we started off by putting equal amounts by volume in each and every one of our containers or simulated raised beds. Once we had an equal amount of soil in each of these, we added two pre-ermed lettuce seeds and two pre-germinated tomato seeds to each of these. And then I maintained equivalent soil moisture levels in each of these for the last 6 and 1/2 weeks.