Even in soil, if your Ph is too low (or too high for that matter) you will have the same nute lockout issues that you run into with other methods (I'm talking about growing indoors in pots, not outdoors in the ground). That being said though, soil growing is MUCH more forgiving of Ph issues than other methods. I know on my indoor soil grow i adjust my water/nutes solution to a Ph of 6.8 to 7.0 generally. This gives me a runoff Ph of somewhere between 6.2 and 6.5 which seems to work just fine for my girls. It may be overkill, but before I started adjusting the Ph of the solution I was having MAJOR problems with nute deficiencies. Once I started adjusting it up (it always seems to come out at 5.9 or 6.0 before adjusting) the problems all went away, so I'll keep on doing what works.