Soil ph

whats a good way to bring up or down the ph in your soil.. growing with fox farm ocean forest

Have you checked the pH of the actual soil? Why do you need to adjust it? It should be properly limed, so the pH of the soil will remain stable through out the entire grow. The soil itself will buffer the pH of anything going in, to that of the soil. If you water with a liquid that has a pH of 7.5, the soil will change that to 6.8 or whatever the soils pH is. It does so as the water sits in contact with it. Run off isn't any indicator, because it just "ran thru", and wasn't in contact with the soil long enough to be changed significantly.

the ph in my soil is reading at 7.0

How are you checking it? You have an accurate meter? There is a tutorial on testing the soil in my journal. 7.0 isn't high enough to cause problems, but ideally you want it to be 6.8.

I don't have a probe, but my version of testing is via runoff. I put in 6.8 water, out comes 6.2-6.3. Straight FFOF. That tells me it's way too acidic. I added a tbsp of lime to the top inch or two and water with 7.0 now, runoff is 6.8. Seems to have fixed my lockout problems. You said it isn't accurate because it won't change much when going through soil so quickly, but obviously my results beg to differ.

That is not an accurate way to get the pH of the soil, but hey, let us know how that works out for ya!!! You'll be chasing pH from now til the cows come home and create all kinds of problems in doing so. You need to know the pH of the soil at the onset of the grow. Once that is established, there is NO FURTHER need to concern yourself with the pH. It will not change over the course of a grow, no matter what the pH of your watering solution is. You cant dump enough water thru that soil to leech out the lime/dolomite.

i got a digital meter at home depot. how do you test to check if its accurate..

Get some calibration solution (7.01). Check that, and there should be an adjustment screw on it somewhere. You want it to read 7.0 with the calibration solution.