We are dishing the dirt today with our gardening expert! Brian Jervis is a horticulturist with the OSU Extension office here in Tulsa and we are talking about soil.
we are dishing the dirt today with our gardening expert Brian Jervis is a horticulturist with the OSU Extension Office here in Tulsa and we are talking about soil today welcome great to see you glad to be here you know you start thinking about the time of year and it’s like is this too early to talk about soils you know soil’s kind of underrated you know those plants underneath you know the the roots underneath the ground they they’re just as important as the tops so um it’s a great time to start thinking about it do soil tests that’ll give you a couple a month head lead to to try to get ready and and have the best production for your soil let’s start with this full screen cuz I kind of want to just give an overview for our viewers out there and I think the first thing I learned from you is all soils are not the same and for those of us who have tried to work in the soil we find sandy soil in some parts of town you find clay Rock I mean it’s just it can be a real headache it can be all over the board and then you build a house and put all the field dirt in your in in the lawn so then you got even a more worse mixture on that but yeah I mean you got you got good good sandy soil but it doesn’t hold a lot of water and then on the flip coin of that is the clay soil where it holds too much so there’s got to be a happy median in there but we do get a lot of calls on I got I got bad soil how can I fix that right organic matter is our number one that’s what we say all the time whether it’s composted leaves uh grass clippings anything like that to get into that soil what that does that allows pores uh air pores water pores to get in to hold that to hold that you know to get things in there to hold those nutrients in so that’ll help drain that clay soil a little better you also had mentioned you get kind of what you pay for yeah especially on potting soil there’s potting soils all over the board and you’ll see you know discounted potting mixes then you’ll see high dollar bags of potting mix but you do you definitely get what you pay for what willing to yes and what you’re willing kind of what you’re after if you’re after house plants they may have a house plant mixture but just a good allpurpose bag of potting soil is is probably going to work pretty good for you but don’t go cheap and you don’t necessarily have to go the very expensive route okay you brought some items down here let’s start here in the center so so yeah an example in the green bag just an example of a local local brand that she mixes it here in Tulsa and does a really good job so you can find that there’s a lot of different ones out there um your your box stores will have them and there’s some good ones there too so that’s what that is um what are you looking for like on that one is there anything like numbers or so on the potting soore you’re not going to have a a nutrient number you’re going to have uh I like feeling it smelling it I mean that one’s going to be real loose uh it’s going to be real Airy and then once you put water to it it’ll drain pretty well so that one’s a good one um and then the other bag is is is fertilizer lots of different fertilizers out there and don’t get don’t get tied up on the brand name or all that generics are just the same the numbers are on that bag that’s a guarantee what’s in that bag so this one on the screen’s a triple 13 so each one of their nitrogen is the first number phosphorus is the second and potassium is the third so I like to you know do a soil test and and that way we know if we need phosphorus and pottassium phosphorus and potassium that last two numbers they’re immobile in the soil so once they go in there they don’t leave that first number is nitrogen that’s our main that’s our main one that gets our plants to grow well grow tall do things like that and when we’re fertilizing we should be basing our fertilization on that nitrogen so somebody’s watching at home they’ve never had their soil tested kind of walk me through that process so yeah we we do soil tests here at at the extension office do quite a few about 1,500 a year so that’s a great thing that way you know if if people are having problems with their soil pull pull a sample so not only one sample but in that area that you want tested pull 15 little samples mix all of those up and bring us a full full Pint of soil bring it in a bag any any kind of bag we’re going to put it in ours put a label on it it takes about 10 days 2 weeks to get our results back and it’s $10 cash or check there at the office that’s perfect and then once you get an explanation of what our soil is then you can make kind of help with a plan yeah we can hone in on more focusing the right fertilizers we don’t want to put a lot of phosphorus and potassium in our soils cuz it gets down into the streams and then it turns you know turns our stream our streams green and all the bad stuff so we want to get the right amount um and and we’ll put that down on the on the form you brought up here too a couple of the um fertilizers yeah so you know Miracle Grow everybody’s heard that’s just a soluble fertilizer um there’s lots of different kinds again brand names are you know you don’t have to worry about but what those are good for is your pots your your containers where you’re putting that potting soil in doesn’t have a lot of soil to hold those nutrients so you need to supply that a little more often you can supply it with a water soluble fertilizer I love it if you need more information check out Brian and the folks at the OSU Extension Office uh you can find them on the web great to see you we’ll see you again next month really close spring not too far off right