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Garden Sulfur

By Ben Mester

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 11Oct2010
Word count: 507
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As one who's run a landscaping business, I like to experiment with different types of fertilizer and soil amendments, and garden sulfur is something I've become very happy with. But like all fertilizers and soil amendments, garden sulfur will only work well in certain circumstances. Instead of garden sulfur, you may need garden iron, or garden phosphorus, or any number of things. Whatever the soil is deficient in, that's what you need to replenish. Because your average person can't really diagnose what's missing, and because often the soil needs a range of amendments, fertilizers are usually multipurpose, replenishing the soil with many different elements and nutrients. That's not a bad practice, and we often use multipurpose fertilizer in gardens and lawns. But to get the best results, it's good to know what your plants need. Below is explained not only the benefits of garden sulfur, but also to know what to look for to see if you should be using it in your garden.

Garden sulfur helps balance the pH of the soil that it's spread over. Depending on what kinds of plants you have, whether acid loving plants or alkaline loving, garden sulfur might be just the right thing for you. Garden sulfur will raise the acid level of the soil it's spread over so you can see why you would need to be careful. If you're not sure whether or not your plants are acid loving, there are a few things you can do to test before you go out and spread garden sulfur over everything. Some acid loving plants are roses, azaleas, pines, hydrangeas, blueberries and evergreens. One easy test is to spread old coffee grounds on the soil around the roots of your potential acid loving plants. This will also raise the acidity of the soil. Even if you're not a coffee drinker yourself, you can usually go to your local Starbucks to get grounds. Many of them even have old coffee grounds sitting out in bags for free, but if they don't, you can always ask for a bag.

Once you have your old coffee grounds, spread a little all around the roots of your plants, and water it into the soil. Then watch carefully to see whether or not your plants do better or worse. If they do better, then you should think about picking up a bag of garden sulfur to do the real amendments and to bring the pH of the soil into optimum levels. It's not terrible expensive and it has plant nutrients in it as well. That being said however, I know of a lot of people who have had great experience using coffee grounds as a permanent amendment to their soil. Coffee grounds contain a wide variety of other soil nutrients such as Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium as well as Sulfur. It's generally good and rich in nutrients. Just be careful with it. Like I said earlier, it WILL lower the pH of your soil, making it more acidic. So don't just go putting it everywhere.

Thanks for checking up on garden sulfur and its uses in yards. For more on fertilizing and taking care of a garden, check out another of my articles on organic lawn fertilizer.

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