From

Location

Message

Date Posted

Cooks Creek, Manitoba, Canada

I am looking for any opinions here. I just finished talking to one of our local fertilizer producer/experts about doing soil samples. He indicated to me that he finds doing tissue samples will give you a better idea of what is actually going on with the soil and plant. The example he gave was with a strawberry grower who was having production problems. The soil test indicated everything was right where it should be but the tissue sample indicated that the plants were low in copper. They increased the amount of copper and the plants took off and produced well.

Costs are the same either way.

3/20/2003 8:24:07 AM

Garden State Pumpkins

Wow Bez, Tissue sample analysis is expensive down here. What labs are you using would love to try that. Chuck

3/20/2003 8:39:13 AM

Cooks Creek, Manitoba, Canada

The costs aren't cheap: $58.00 CND. He uses a US lab - Harris I believe. I haven't been able to locate someone locally that will do a full garden/farm soil test for less than $45 CND. I figure the shipping costs must make up at least 50% of the costs as the turn around time is 72 hours.

3/20/2003 9:06:03 AM

Montoursville, PA

Your country places a high value on the use of flora and fauna. Check for schools, government agencys and such that train your professional agri managers. I would think you would have an equal to our university agriculture centers. In Pennsylvania, Penn State University soil tests for the basics are under $10.00 with extras for special interests costing about $5.00 extra. They make soil test bags availabe at our retail garden centers.

3/20/2003 10:01:58 AM

Columbus Ohio

Bez
I have written an article on this for the IPGA. Basically you need to do both test. The Soil test will help you to fix problems in your soil. As this takes years to do you should also do a tissue test to see what you plant needs that year. Then you can fix your problems with foliar applications. I plan on doing 3 tissue test this year. One when the plants are big enough to test, one 2 weeks before I plan on setting fruit and the one at the 30 day fruit mark. this I hope will get me the best results.
Last year I could not even get a fruit to set and tested and found out why. I ended up with 2 fruit in the 600 pound range which are my 2 best fruit ever.
I hope this help you to make your decision.
John

3/20/2003 10:24:07 AM

Key West, FL

How do you take a tissue sample? Just cut off a piece of a leaf?

3/20/2003 2:04:12 PM

Cooks Creek, Manitoba, Canada

Ben, he indicated that you would need several leaves and you should take them when they are growing strongly - around the 8-12" width range. So these would be leaves near the ends of the vines, probably around 3-7 days old. Thus this is not something you can do early on, you need to wait until the plant has gotten fairly large - I'm figuring mid to late June.

3/20/2003 2:26:59 PM

Columbus Ohio

the proper way to take a tissue sample is to take 3-5 of the newest mature leaves. I have found this to be about the 5 leaf from the tip.
Once you tqke them you can do 2 things. first you could package them in a paper bag and send to your lab for testing or you can wash them with distilled water and a little soap and then start to dry them.
I was in a hurry and did the second choice. I picked them in the morning, dried them in the sun all day and overnighted them and I recieved results in 5 days including a weekend
John

3/20/2003 2:40:46 PM

[email protected]

John is correct. Soil tests are the bare minimum and afford the grower a starting point. But when a customer still can't get things to click, I recommend the tissue test for high value plants. Often subtle soil nutrient imbalances can cause a border-line element to fall into dificiency. The tissue culture will prove this out for correction.

Steve

3/20/2003 11:01:13 PM