Today we are doing a soil test from J.M. Fortier's "The Market Gardener". And this is a
quick and easy test you can use to determine your soil composition if you
don't want to pay for a lab soil test. And... mommy, you're talking to the camera....yeah I have to talk to the camera
that's how you shoot a video gooby. So side note, if you have not read The Market
Gardener book I highly recommend it. Even if you are not a market gardener, which I
am not at the moment, there's a lot of useful insights for just improving your
gardening success overall. So let's jump in. Jump! So determining the makeup of your
soil composition is important because it lets you know if you need to tweak
anything and having good soil composition is absolutely critical in
your success as a gardener. It will make the rest of gardening so much easier. So
there are three types of soil, essentially. There's clay soil, sandy soil,
and loam. So the first soil type and the type you
really want to be your goal is loam. Loam is the perfect mixture of clay, sand, and
silt, and it combines the best of all the types. So it typically has good fertility,
good water retention, but at the same time it offers plenty of aeration and
good drainage. So here is an example of fairly loamy soil. It's not perfect but
we started with dense clay and we've been amending these beds for years. So
you can see we got a good amount of rainfall last night and the soil is damp
but it's still fairly crumbly. I can just kind of stick my knife down in here
things aren't sticking together and that's due to the mixture of the
different types- the sand, and the loam, and the clay. The next soil type is sandy
soil. So you can tell if you have sand because it's very loose and crumbly, it
tends to dry out very easily, and when you try to hold it together it won't
stay in a ball. This is an example of sandy soil. This was actually a load of
topsoil that we brought in to amend our clay soil and my little guy has
been playing with the extra in his dump truck here. But you can see how sandy
soil, you can actually see the sand in this, but it typically will be very
crumbly. So this is wet and it still just crumbles apart like sand. And you'll
typically see quite a bit of like gravel and even small stones in this.
It's pretty sandy huh bubby? Yeah. Cause I just filled up this for you. You filled this up for me? Thank you.
Sandy soil can be challenging because it does tend to drain and dry out so
quickly, so you'll want to amend it by adding things like compost and well-aged
manure, as well as making sure to add fertilizer in small doses throughout the
season to kind of combat the issues with leaching of nutrients. And the third soil
type is clay, as demonstrated here. Clay is possibly the most challenging type to
work with, and you can tell you have clay because it's wet and sticky and will
easily form into a ball. Guys show 'em the, show them your balls of clay. You can
just show them, okay you don't have go right by the... bubby! bubby! You don't have to go right by the
camera. But as you can see we've just dug some up out of our yard. This is our
native soil before it's been amended and it is stereotypical clay. Clay is as I
mentioned is very sticky, it's very dense, it tends to have poor drainage and
poor aeration. The one saving grace about clay is that it's usually fairly fertile.
But the nutrients get locked up in that sticky soil, a lot of the time so you
need to work with it to make it available to your plants. To amend clay
it's really good to add a lot of things like sand, and peat, compost, well-aged
manure. Kind of anything that's going to add loft and organic matter to the soil
is going to help. Anything to break up that really sticky dense soil texture. So
yeah, this is an example of what this clay soil will do-- just form a perfect
little ball. It's great for kids sculptures not so great for gardening in.
And when this dries it'll get really hard and you'll see
those big cracks through the soil surface. So to do the soil test as
outlined in The Market Gardener you're just going to take a mason jar and
you're going to put about two inches of whatever soil you want to test
in the bottom of this jar. So I'm going to go around and get a sample of each of
our soil types. So the next step is to just fill up the remainder of the jar
with water, put in a teaspoon of dish soap, and the dish soap is going to act
as a surfactant and help separate the soil particles into layers.
Shake these up really well and just let them set for a day to allow the layers
to separate. Okay so we've let these jars sit for a day and we have clear
separation of the layers on each of these. So this is our clay soil and you
can see here we've got a layer of silt and a big layer of clay, no sand at all
in this one. And this is a clay pot I made from natural clay. So yeah this is
this is what I meant that this clay soil is really great for kids sculptures not
so great for gardening cause this is what it does when it dries-- that's literally
like a clay pot right there. This was our sandy soil and you can see
here- this big section is sand, there's some silt, and there's the tiniest little
ring of clay here at the very top. And this was the closest that I have to loam
soil here on our property. And this is not an ideal ratio but it's better than
the others. So you can see we've got some sand, some silt, and a small amount of
clay here at the top. What you'll see if you do this is that the bottom layer is
going to be your heaviest stuff so it's the sand and the rocks that type of
thing- your sandy particles are going to drop to the bottom. The next layer is
going to be silt- so you can see here sand silt. And then
the top most layer will be clay and it's usually the lightest color of those
three things. And an ideal ratio is going to be about 20 percent clay, 40 percent
silt, and 40 percent sand. And we're not, you can see we're not meeting any of
those ratios exactly here, but this gives me an idea of what I need to work on,
what I need to amend with to fix our soils. Thanks watching and see you next
time!