Acidify soil at home
Many house and garden plants that we like are acidophilic plants. They must be planted in acid soil. Learn how to acidify soil at home.
Before you reach for mineral fertilizers, it is worth considering natural home remedies to acidify the soil.
Many problems occurring in the cultivation can be solved by using proven and effective home methods, without the need to shop in a garden store and reach for various chemicals.
In particular, these home methods allow us to fight numerous diseases and pests, and the substances commonly used for this purpose, available in almost every household, are: baking soda, potassium soap (i.e. simply gray soap), milk (used, among others, for spraying tomatoes), baker’s yeast or self-prepared extracts and decoctions of garlic and onions. It is not surprising, therefore, that home remedies for soil acidification are also sought.
However, before you start acidifying the soil using home methods, it is worth measuring the pH of the soil to make sure that acidification is really necessary.
If it turns out that the pH of the soil is too high, then it is worth lowering it, i.e. acidifying the earth.
Among the home methods to acidify the soil, 3 are mainly recommended:
- citric acid
- vinegar
- coffee grounds
Let’s discuss them one by one 🙂
Lemon juice
Citric acid
It is commonly link with lemon juice. Aa safe product of natural origin. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Citric acid is common ingredient in the food industry as an acidity regulator and antioxidant.
It actually lowers the pH of food products and therefore makes them acidic. Hence the belief that you can acidify the soil for plants with citric acid.
Unfortunately, there are no official recommendations regarding dosage.
Although acidification of the soil with citric acid seems to be safe for plants. You should use this method at your own risk and experiment to find the right dosage.
The use of citric acid obtained by the chemical industry, by synthetic route, it is completely pointless.
In my opinion, it is much better to use a mineral acidifying fertilizer. It is ready to use and have the correct dosage.
Vinegar
This is another home method to acidify the soil, often recommended on the Internet. Anyway, vinegar in the garden has a wider application, including as a repellent for cats, snails, ants and uninvited insects.
To acidify the soil you should dilute vinegar with water in a ratio of 1:8 (1 vinegar / 8 water).
The guide orders to perform such acidification at least 3 weeks before the planned date of planting. You should not water already plants gowing.
The fact that you cannot water the growing plants with vinegar to acidify the soil does not surprise me. Vinegar is much better ingredient in a homemade weed remedy that destroys all weeds.
Its comparable effectiveness to glyphosate-based total herbicides such as Roundup and Sprinter. This is the best proof that vinegar applied to plants that are already growing is deadly for them.
So, if someone decides to use vinegar to acidify the soil before planting new plants, they must do so with caution and with 3-week interval between acidification and planting.
And before planting plants, measure the pH of the soil to make sure that its pH is correct.
Coffee grounds
This home method of acidifying the soil seems to be definitely more recommendable. It is completely natural, environmentally friendly, because you use coffee grounds instead of throwing them away.
This method is already a bit researched and you can rely on some data to confirm that it makes sense.
Well, in assessing the usefulness of using coffee grounds, the well-known Starbucks chain came to our aid, which together with SUNSET carried out the “The Starbucks coffee compost test”.
As it turned out, coffee grounds contain, among others. phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and slowly released nitrogen.
This is their advantage, because these ingredients are very important for acidophilic plants. Additionally, they contain almost no calcium, which deacidifies the soil.
But there is also a catch! Well, the pH of the tested coffee grounds was 6.2. It is very close to natural level. Soil with this level are only slightly acidic.
Therefore, coffee grounds can be used on acidified soils as a good fertilizer for acid-loving plants. Which helps to maintain the acidic pH of the soil.
However, the power of their action is by no means so great that the alkaline soil can be effectively acidified with the use of coffee grounds after brewing coffee.
So, as you can see from commonly recommended home methods of soil acidification, basically all of them have some “but”. Their use does not have to be safe, and their effectiveness has not been confirmed.
The most recommendable is the use of coffee grounds, but more as a fertilizer supporting the growth of acidophilic plants than as a typical soil acidifier.
Among the natural ways to acidify the garden soil, I can recommend mixing soil with acid garden peat, pine needles and sawdust from conifers, as well as mulching the soil with acid pine bark.
After mixing the soil with acid peat, you immediately get an acid substrate (the effect is, however, short-lived), and the sawdust and needles slowly decomposing in the ground will acidify the soil for a long time.
It’s a good idea to combine these methods and add both peat and coniferous sawdust or pine needles.
Some gravel and pebbles used for mulching decorative beds, such as granite or quartz, also have an acidifying effect.
However, you have to be careful here, because many types of aggregate have the opposite effect, i.e. alkaline-forming.
It is also worth watering acidophilic plants with rainwater, which, unlike tap water, does not contain calcium, and therefore at least does not counteract the desired acidification of the soil.
