I am looking to fix a relatively cheap soil test kit, most likely one that you send out to a lab for results, which will tell me if my soil is safe to plant a vegetable garden in. I have found a bunch of different soil test kits, i.e. PH, moisture, etc. but none for contaminates. Thank you for all of your help in advance !
I can only speak from experience which is slightly old now that I'm retired.......The tests for contaminants is contaminate specific, that is you must specify what contaminant you are looking for and then the appropriate test is made.......at a very high cost......$150 a pop back then. We could not do a broad screen contaminate test.....we had to have an idea first. I'd suggest you have a typical soil test done by a Laboratory and include micro nutrients such as iron, etc. Contact your Cooperative Extension agent in your county to learn about the soil test process, how to properly gather the soil and how to package and of course, how much $ to include. The agent can also help decide if the soil might have been contaminated. A simple test for herbicides is to gather some soil into two pots. In one grow lawn grass or corn and in the other grow beans. Certain herbicides work on either a monocot or dicot type plant. For example if you can't grow the bean but can grow the corn you know the soil has residual herbicide for dicots.
