One other detail: how do people ever grow anything
in peaty container mixes, if the pH is so suboptimal?
It is not suboptimal for everything, even if it is
for most vegetables. Azaleas and blueberries have
no problem with the pH levels of peat moss, for
example. But the real answer for tomato growers
is probably humates, organic compounds that bind
to nutrients in fertilizer and make them available
to plants even at pH levels that would make most
of those nutrients insoluble in soil. Peat has some
humic acid, compost has more. Your average container
mix is probably also low in the metals, etc, that those
nutrients bind to in soil in excessively low or high pH
conditions (making them insoluble).
re: litmus paper - I am assuming that buying a $100-800
industrial pH tester for testing the initial pH of a given
bag of container mix does not sound reasonable to a home
gardener.
Anyway, if you litmus test the containers that had a cup
of dolomite added to one side after two months and it
shows a little alkaline (if 1 cup of dolomite for half an
Earthtainer was too much for that batch of container mix),
you can pour a small bottle of vinegar into the water reservoir
for instant relief and/or drop a couple of tablespoons of
wettable sulfur into the reservoir for longer term adjustment
(it will get wicked up with the water).
That is one nice thing about these Earthboxes and Homemade
Earthboxes: with that consistent water flow through the
container mix via wicking, it is easy to make adjustments
to soil chemistry by adding water soluble compounds to
the water reservoir.
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