soil temperature

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mmock Otsego, MI(Zone 5b) May 05, 2007

How do you check the soil temperature?
Thanks for any help.

Post #3465157
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81302 Central, WI(Zone 4b) May 05, 2007

You can purchase equipment at garden stores that do this. I think the price is around $20.
If air temperatures are fairly stable (not big swings of 30 degrees or more from day to day, the ground is usually slightly warmer or cooler than that in our climates. Unfortunately can't remember which. Hopefully someone with more knowledge on this will post.

Post #3465514
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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) May 05, 2007

Soil temps tend to fluctuate less than air temps, so in cold weather the soil will tend to be warmer and in hot weather it'll tend to be cooler. The farther down you go in the soil, the less fluctuation you'll see. I guess my question would be why do you need to know the soil temperature, and how critical is having an accurate measurement? For most gardening purposes that I can think of it's not super critical to have a perfectly accurate measurement so I don't know if you really need to buy something to do this. In an agricultural business I could see that maybe you'd want to know the soil temp before you planted seeds, but for the average backyard gardener you're probably just as well off going by last frost dates, etc to figure out when to plant things rather than spending money on something to measure soil temps.

Post #3465592
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claypa West Pottsgrove, PA(Zone 6b) May 06, 2007

Supposedly crabgrass will sprout when the soil reaches 55F, and if you apply corn gluten meal at the time the soil reaches that temperature, it will not sprout. So I watched the maps on this link carefully to see when that happened in my area:
http://www.greencastonline.com/SoilTempMaps.aspx

There's a link on the NOAA weather page to weather stations in some states that measure soil temperature, I'll see if I can find it.

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