Choosing a Land Use for your soil test

How you best care for your soil depends in part on its land use type. For instance, a lawn will have different requirements to a vegetable garden. At the same time, the needs of plants within the vegetable garden will vary - peas will be different to cabbages, etc.

One of the reasons we recommend the Garden Soil Tests from SWEP Laboratories is that they can take all this into account and give you the information you need for best results. So the notes that follow relate specifically to those soil tests only. Soil tests from other laboratories will not give you the same options.

Garden vs Farm

You may think that soil-is-soil and that there would be little need to do anything differently between tests for gardens and farms. Of course, the tests themselves are the same, but how that data is handled and interpreted is different.

For a start, gardens tend to be somewhat smaller than farms, so giving a gardener recommendations in kilos (or tonnes) per hectare may not be so helpful. For this reason, the SWEP Garden test reports give all recommendations in "grams per square metre" (g/mē).

Another difference is that farms tend to have only one productive land use - wheat, or apples, or dairy pasture, ad so on. Although each plant species has its own nutrient requirements, a farm is usually easy to cater for, in terms of the recommendations provided.

On the other hand, gardens can have hundreds of different plants, each with their own requirements. To properly cater for all their needs, the soil test report could well end up looking like a volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica!

So the soil test reports from SWEP use the following system. It may seem a bit complicated, but it gives you all the flexibility you need to ensure a healthy, vigorous garden. So read the following notes carefully and contact us if you have any questions.

Garden Land Uses

To overcome the problem of providing recommendations suited to the needs of many different plants, SWEP developed nine (9) special Garden Land uses that deal with groups of plants, rather than individual varieties. These Land uses are:

1. Lawns
2. Pome fruits (Apples, Pears, Nashi, Quince, etc.)
3. Stone fruit (Peaches, Apricots, Plums, Cherries, etc.)
4. Berries
5. Leafy vegetables
6. Fruiting vegetables
7. Root vegetables
8. Trees and Shrubs
9. Flower beds

Each soil test report from SWEP allows you to specify a maximum of three Land uses. If you need more than this, you can simply order additional reports for $10 each.

Recommendations

As mentioned earlier, gardens work better with recommendations in g/mē. This problem is fixed by simply specifying one of the Garden Land Uses listed above.

However, there is a useful side-benefit to doing it this way. It means that you can mix both Garden and Farm Land uses on the same report and still get recommendations for garden maintenance.

This may just seem to be an annoying complication, but let's look at an example:

Lets say a gardener is keen on growing vegetables, but is especially proud of his tomatoes and potatoes. Tomatoes are a "Fruiting vegetable" and potatoes are a root vegetable. So to get the best coverage for his garden as a whole, he could specify the following three land uses:

1. Leafy vegetables (ensuring the recommendations come out right)
2. Tomatoes, and
3. Potatoes

This would make sure he got the benefit of the same information provided to commercial tomato and potato growers for his special crops, while still getting excellent results for all his other vegetables.

But what if he wanted to do things in more detail. In this case he could order two additional reports (costing an extra $20) with one of the garden vegetable land uses on each one and a total of six specific vegetable types. The list could look something like this:

Farm Land uses

These are all specific plant types and actually include many ornamentals, so if you want specific recommendations for Daphne, or Camellias, or Ginseng, or Walnuts, etc. - just let SWEP know and they will do their best to help.

OK, so this is a bit complicated. But if you need any help, just use the form below to contact us.