I do not know about The United States but most provinces in Canada offer free soil testing. I think it is a good thing for gardeners to have done.

Sometimes a small addition of some sort can make a major differance to the growing ability. These soil testing places are usually set up by governments to assist farmers.

For some reason my parents encouraged me to plant a small gardens when very young.Results where so so until I found out how to improve soils. In general.

I live in a class two soil area now. Cheap ground limestone powder treatment gets the PH of the soil into much better shape than otherwise here. Since soil even in a class two area will vary.Soil testing especially free is a good ideal first.

Some municipalities also give away well rotted compost but it is usually very heavy. Generally almost any soil can stand improvement.

There is no comparison to how a garden performs on average soil compared to really good soil.On a small home garden it usually is pretty inexpensive to modify the soil as needed.

We have not planted a garden in forty five years. The wife has been lightly agitating for a raised garden at the beach. I will try to get it together this year.

We have an old property up the road that had a pig barn on it until 60 years ago. It has a lot of extremely rotted down pig manure still available. I will take a dump truck load of it out to the cottage to mix in with the local soil out there. The weather over the years has not leached the real goodness out of that manure.

I could legally sell it by the bag to grow an illegal plant in it easily enough. Someone went on the property and planted a few seedlings in it. I accidentally found them after they had grown up.

Spectacular size and quality for our area. No I am not a cheek and chong type of person.Still I have seen the average size of plant in our area and those ones exceeded them in size and quality. I did figure that the properties value or worth was suddenly and unexpectantly increased though.

I just put a small sign up that there was to be no more weed grown on this property after whoever you are have harvested this. I figured I was looking at plants worth perhaps a thousand dollars each locally.

That is how I figured out that the old pig manure was the growth medium. Obviously someone else must have know it was there as well.

The manure was so old it did not burn the plants even in concentration. Unfortunatly that day I also found the old barns slab as well pretty much intact but covered up over all the years.

We had a escavator tear down a much smaller barn on the same property only a year ago. It easily dealt with breaking up it's slab.

That one was obviously used for cattle in it's day. It was a shame to ruin the old beams it was constructed with but it was too dangerous to try to salvage them. They were all pegged together but I think they were reused beams to build that barn. Square timbers by hand judging from the marks on a lot of them.They must have really put in a days work originally when they were fabricated. I have a few long pieces left that I may try to treat and use for the better halfs raised garden. Used railway ties have gotten pretty scarce locally in the last few years.