How to use a Rapitest at-home soil test to figure out what your garden needs

Josh CentersContributor - April 10, 2021

A lot of people try gardening by putting seeds in the ground and waiting. When nothing comes up, or plants barely grow, they chalk it up to being bad
[See the full post at: How to use a Rapitest at-home soil test to figure out what your garden needs]

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I used a Rapitest for the first time (thanks to this blog post) so I thought I’d give a quick rundown on my experience, and share some thoughts! Also open to feedback.

My new tomato plant started showing some yellowing leaves, so I thought it might be lacking nutrients (I also discovered that I’ve been underwatering it, but that’s another story). I did a quick googling and found out that tomatoes need a lot of nitrogen, so I remembered about this article and thought I’d try the Rapitest. I got the $20 pack that contains all four tests. The first package was canceled by the vendor, citing inventory issues. I was worried that disruptions to the supply chain had affected this product, but decided to wait a couple of days to try again and everything went fine 🙂

I first tested the pH – the results were quick, but I don’t think the results match exactly the scale on the right. However, I could maybe place it in the acidic/slight acidic zone? Which should be ok for a tomato, no?

My soil contains a lot of mulch floaters so for the other three tests I decided to let the soil/water mix stand for 24 hours. Even after all this time, there were a lot of floaters still around and when I went to gather a simple for the nitrogen, I inadvertently introduced some soil in the test chamber – which is apparently a no-no according to the instructions. I decided to scoop out most floaters with a sieve and let the water stand a little bit longer. That did the trick.

What I discovered: nitrogen seems low, which I was expecting but it was nice to have it confirmed!

Other than that, all the other readings seem fine to me. Here’s the phosphorus:

And here’s the potash:

Also to note that the test chamber is small enough that it’s easy to spill some of the reagent over, like you see in the picture below. Next time I’ll try snapping the end of the capsule off with scissors, like Josh recommends, and see if that helps.

Overall, I thought it very easy to use, and for my purpose (a few plants in my backyard) seems like a good investment. I’ve now started a general tomato food treatment which contains nitrogen, and want to wait a couple of weeks before testing it again.

 

That’s great! Thanks for sharing your experience.