Results of Our Fall Soil Tests

We took more soil samples a few weeks ago to see if the liming that we did in December 2012 had an impact on raising our soil pH which was about 5.3. We took soil samples based on how we thought our vines were performing and divided the field into octants, roughly based on our grape variety. Interestingly, the pH of our soil where our Chardonnay, clone 96 is planted on the extreme east side of our field, was at a lower pH (5.5) than the rest of the field, with the exception of one block of Chenin blanc on the south side of our field, (I don't quite understand why this is the case). We made an Excel spreadsheet of the results from the beginning of our soil sampling to see if we could see any other trends, especially for potassium, zinc, sulfur and boron, which was also incorporated in the soil at the same time that we did the liming.
Mark Chien has a great presentation called Grapevine Nutrition¹ where he advises how much of the macro- and micronutrients should constitute an appropriate level or range so we added that information to the spreadsheet so that it would be easy to decipher if we had the appropriate levels:

My husband, being an analytical chemist by training was way ahead of me in deciphering the soil analysis report. He determined what kind of lime we needed based on the soil report. In order to provide informed data for this blog, I pulled out our copy of Wine Grape Production Guide for Eastern North America and turned to the chapter on Nutrient Management. There I found a good explanation for cation exchange capacity (CEC), base saturation, nutrient anions and organic matter, which are additional information included in the soil analysis. It was very complicated. I'll write more about the interactions between pH, CEC, base saturation and organic matter soon.

References:
1. Mark Chien, Grapevine Nutrition, Penn State, College of Agricultural Sciences.
2. Wine Grape Production Guide for Eastern North America, Tony Wolf (Editor), published 2008.