Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been using these tests consistently and successfully for four years after I had one year of very low production in my vegetable garden. The test showed that first year, after two seasons of not amending my soil and thus suffering some crop failure, was that my soil was depleted of essential nutrients for plant growth and needed to be amended.[...] DUH on me. So, I amended the soil based on the test results and the amounts recommended to get my soil's levels back to "Sufficient" and guess what? Great harvests! I've been testing and amending my soil every spring before planting the year's vegetable garden and have had nothing but great success. Just to give you a gauge, success (to me) means 200+ lbs of tomatoes from four plants. Which might make you think that I love this product without condition, but that's not necessarily so. Pros: The readings are easy enough to get by following the instructions on the package. Just mix your soil with water in the amounts described, add the water mixture to the test containers with the corresponding capsule [...] It's inexpensive. The test kit has 80 tests included, that's 20 per test (pH, N, P, K) and, if you have four vegetable beds going like I do, that's 5 seasons' worth of testing. The amendments are fairly simple to calculate. There are calculations included in the package that let you easily figure out the amount of amendments you need to add to bring your soil from its current state to the "Sufficient" state given the size of your growing space. It involves some math, but since I'm fairly Math Challenged and managed to figure it out, I'm confident that any person of reasonable intelligence can do it, too. Cons: Ordering refills for the capsules is lame. You have to use the order sheet included to order new capsule refills for the tests and send them a check for your order like in the old school days of Scholastic book orders and such. There's no online ordering available. I am going to try ordering over the phone, but that's still a massive pain in the ass, so it'd be an extreme bonus if they decided to offer these through Amazon or another online outlet like a shopping cart on the LusterLeaf site. The amendments they recommend are not natural or organic. When I first used this test I was all hopped up to add amendments to my soil to "make it right" but found that the amendments they recommend (Muriate of Potash, Aluminum Sulfate, etc) are total organic no-nos. I had to do some hunting around on the old internet to figure out the organic alternatives to the amendments they recommended. Not a huge deal, but it did take extra work. [...] All in all, I've had good results with these tests and recommend them highly for their simplicity and availability.