Hi, Guys! John is correct. Except for his understandably eastern bias! In the west, most land is alkaline, and about the worst thing you can do to your lawn is put lime on it when you plant grass. That's why you see all of us locals laughing when a recent immigrant from the beautiful, wet, green east does just that on our dry, brown, alkaline soil! (By the way, I'm a native Virginian.) Incidentally, for those of you who are interested, that old fire bird, Edmund Ruffin (of VA), who claimed to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumpter in 1861, was famous for having developed the lime method for reclaiming the old, worn-out farmland that existed in eastern Virginia at the time of the Civil War. There are many articles about this in the historical magazines. Until that time, worn out farm land was abandoned and the farmer moved west. The overgrown Wilderness, where the battle took place, was such an area. Tom Robertson Escondido, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Subject: Re: The use of Lime in farming > Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 14:06:46 -0500 > From: "John Hamilton" <johnrhamilton@mindspring.com> > To: SW_VA-L@rootsweb.com > > Adding lime to the garden raises the pH. Most soil tends to be acid and most > vegetables like a soil that has a PH level close to neutral (7.0). Burn or > pulverized lime is more dissolvable by the soil than crushed lime. > > I believe that burnt lime has been used as cement since Roman times. > > We need the chemist folks to help , there may be a temperature factor for > whether the lime is to be used just for agriculture or cement. > > John