Safe Soil UK – Your Soil in Safe Hands – It can be disappointing when your garden does not give the fruitful return you had hoped for. Months of preparation, hard graft, watering, feeding and all the enthusiasm you can muster will not give you the yield if the soil is not up to the job.
Over time, randomly feeding the soil has not necessarily been the answer for my plot. It is an old property, so the base soil has been there from previous generations, so I have turned to professional help with the aid of Safe Soil UK – soil testing and analysis made easy.
It is not just my garden that can be affected by poor soil conditions. Unfortunately, Britain’s proud industrial and farming heritage has left behind a legacy of contamination, with countless substances and waste products that have the potential to harm human health discharged into the ground. Even if plants appear to be thriving, the soil they grow in may not be free from pollution and contamination.
The fact is that the presence of potentially harmful heavy metals, various hydrocarbons, asbestos, and other things that can pose significant risks to our health can exist in the soil seemingly without affecting what’s growing in it. With time their presence can have a negative impact on our general well-being.
With eco gardening in mind, homegrown garden produce is something many of us are working towards for a healthy lifestyle. The same also applies to soil fertility. Again, just because most plants seem to be doing relatively well, does not necessarily mean that the soil has sufficient supplies of nutrients to allow the things we grow to properly thrive. Or that the type of soil we have – be that its pH, texture, or organic matter content – lends itself to growing the things we want to grow.
The Safe Soil UK testing packages can give you peace of mind that your growing space is safe and/or fertile.
The founder of Safe Soil UK has always been an avid fan of growing vegetables in his urban London garden. Two years ago, when he started to hear local rumours that a site near his house was once a battery factory, he decided to root out potentially harmful contaminants in his soil. However, the process turned out to be costly, complicated, and lengthy, with many questions being asked of him, which he simply did not know the answers to, surely, he should have been receiving the answers he needed!
So, after seeing how difficult the whole process was, Safe Soil UK was born. The team interpret customer’s results and where conflicts exist, they point them out to allow customers, to make informed decisions and, hopefully, provide peace of mind. When that’s not possible, Safe Soil UK are happy to share recommendations on potential remediation approaches.
Safe Soil UK believe the testing of urban soils should be easy to do – and, in turn, the results of this testing should be straightforward to understand.
There are a wide array of tests available, including the ‘Basic Metals Screen’priced at £50, which covers ten common metals that can be present in urban and rural soils, in some cases at levels that can contaminate growing spaces and pose serious risks to our health. Chief among these are the big three of lead, mercury and arsenic.
For fertility, the ‘State Of Your Soil’ test priced at £70, provides analysis of soilpH, texture and organic matter as well as a measure of the three major plant nutrients: potassium, phosphorus and magnesium. Detailed interpretation of the results is provided and suggestions on how to best improve soil quality with appropriate fertiliser recommendations to help customers get the most from their garden – whether that involves growing vegetables, fruit, flowers, lawns, or a combination of these.
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