Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and previously I did a video on using the mason
jar test on soil to separate the layers of sand, silt and clay in your soil you're usually using
this to determine the texture of your soil but the question i got more than once was can i also
use that to take that layer of clay out of there and harvest that for other uses. What other uses?
well of course people use clay for things like pottery and other projects so yes you can
definitely use this exact same method and what i'm going to do today i found a spot in my yard that
looked promising for clay content i dug underneath my compost file pile and found a spot where it
felt a little clumpy i'll show you some footage of that and i filled up this bucket with some of
those big heavy clods of what felt like clay soil don't know the exact mixture but that's what the
clay test will determine what the mason jar test will determine is how much of that was clay so i
broke that up into some smaller pieces and what i'll be doing with this mason jar is alongside
as i extract the clay from this bucket i'm also going to do it in this clear mason jar to show
you how and why that works to get you separated clay all right hang on let's soak it in some water
i'm going to add some water to both of these the water that i'm adding you can fill up the whole
container at this point but i'm not going to stir it up just yet i want the material the soil in
there to have a little bit of time to soak in the water and swell if it's clay and really start to
dissolve that's dissolving is an important step to this i'm going to fill it up with water in
the main bucket here and i'm also going to fill it up in the mason jar you're filling
just to leave a tiny bit of air space for mixing around so i've taken the video under cover here
because it got quite bright outside but i want to show you that that scum across the top of the
of the mixture has started to rise and what you do see in there is little chunks of charcoal
a little bits of bark and perlite and just the kind of stuff that collected in the soil by my
compost that is light and organic and shouldn't be in your clay mix anyway so i'm going to dump that
now it's also time to mix and in the mason jar probably accomplish that with something like a
spoon or a knife but in the big bin i can't think of anything better than maybe my shovel blade or
my hand the advantage of doing it with my hand is that i can get a feel at the material that's
at the bottom there and see what it's like is it fully dissolved or is it still in chunks or
clods that's really one of what i want to avoid and i'm just pulling this up here and i can see
that some of these are rocks but other ones i'm going to see if i can get a better view here
other ones of these are still clayish type clods that i can actually squeeze and break up in my
hand that is what you can't have in there for you to do this successfully you have to have all of
those clods fully dissolved so having done it with the big uh bucket with the same soil in it
i've also filled this mason jar a third of the way with the soil and it has been fully dissolved in
the same time frame so now i'm just giving that a vigorous stir because i want to show you how
those layers fall out over time the bottom layer will be sand and gravel the middle layer will be
silt and what's remaining suspended in the water after a half hour should be your clay content
now it doesn't take long to start to work if you look at the bottom of the jar right now and i'll
see if i can get you a close-up here is that the sand has already started to fall out of the
suspension it's sitting there at the bottom of the jar already making a layer of oh say a half inch
or so at the very bottom of the jar now the silt will take some time to drop out the time frame on
that is about a half hour i'm going to put this into sort of fast motion so you can actually see
some of the action of the soil particles falling out of suspension and leaving the clay in the top
layer all right i'm going to insert some footage of the mason jar test and the results of that and
what you can see is that over the course of the first half hour of that jar settling the
layers start to become distinct the sand layer will drop out almost immediately at the bottom
quarter inch of that jar you have the sand and the gravel that's fallen out of the solution
within the first even five to ten seconds it happens within the next 15 to 30 minutes
you'll see the silt layer develop on the bottom of that jar and then everything that's above that
is presumed to be suspended clay now you can see it only settled down to about half the height of
the jar so that's what i'm going to be using as my guideline for how much clay is going to be in this
soil and i want to be safe i really don't want to siphon out any of that silt material and have
that go into the purified solution so what i'm going to do is i'm using a siphon here now i've
seen versions of this where people just pour off the bucket into the other bucket what i'm afraid
that will do is it will disturb that silt layer that's settled to the bottom and then i'll end
up redissolving that into the whole profile of the water and i don't want to do that now siphoning is
something that a lot of people have done if you've cleaned aquariums it's just a simple thing i have
filled this short length of hose maybe three feet of hose up with uh water and if i put my fingers
over both ends of this insert one end into this and then release as i put the bottom end into
the lower bucket i should be able to establish a siphon that pushes the water from the the from
the the depth that i have my hose inserted up here into the lower bucket let's give it a try
there you go and i hope you can hear that it's uh it's siphoning nicely
and i placed the bottom end of the hose in the top bucket here oh about halfway down
and there it is all settled out or all siphoned down and i'll give you a close-up of this in just
a minute but uh what i presume is that the bottom half of the settled water here including the sand
and the silt is sitting still in this bucket here and then i've removed just the suspended clay into
the bottom bucket here you see this is only about halfway full so what i'm going to do is i'm going
to repeat this process i might even repeat it and fill two buckets here with purified clay
water and the reason i'm doing that is i just have no idea how much clay this will develop
into because i've only taken a portion of the water from each of the buckets so
i guess we'll see that when i let it settle and i extract the clay for you well i thought that
leaving it for a week would clear up the division between water and clay and it was nowhere close so
to be honest i took the path of least resistance i stuck this underneath a workbench and forgot about
it for a month now that i've come back to it it is an absolutely clear layer of water on the top
and clay on the bottom right to about this point here i'll try to get you a close-up so you can see
on the side of the bucket as light comes through there's definitely a layer of solids at the bottom
and liquids at the top here and this liquid at the top here while still slightly kind of brownish
is really really uh much clearer than it was before so now i think what i have is a solid
layer of clay at the bottom so i'm going to pour this off now what i could do is just do
a siphon like i did before for the other layers but i think in this case i'm going
to chance it and just try to pour it off and see what remains in the bottom of the bucket
and there we go that is a fully settled layer of clay
just wanted to show you here this is about 12 hours later i've just had this inside
it's starting to firm up a little bit it was quite soupy to begin with but you can see what
i'm doing here is just working it around i've got a fan running in this area and it's just
drying up the balls a little bit and at the end of it i'll have these three balls of clay
well this is the shot i've been waiting for where i have a ball of purified clay
from my made from the soil in my own backyard am i purified i mean i've taken out all the
gravel all the sand all the silt to get this ball of what i presume to be pure clay i have
no idea if this is any good for pottery or for brick making or for any other clay type project
i suspect that would have an awful lot to do with the chemistry of the clay in my soil what i do
know is that the same method would work for you as long as you have a reasonable amount of clay
in your source soil and the method in short of course is very very simple all you're doing is
suspending all of that soil and water and then siphoning off the portion of the water after
the sand and the silt have settled out to get just clay water and then you just leave that to
settle over a length of time now what will differ for you if you have different amounts of clay in
your soil is how much this process yields in my case i processed four buckets of soil to make
two full buckets of clay water and what i ended up with was ten balls like this two pounds of peach
a piece so it's about twenty pounds of purified clay from my own backyard uh it was a little bit
labor intensive it actually took about a month but most of that was waiting time just waiting
for the clay to settle down to the bottom of the bucket all right if you have any questions about
this please drop that down into the comments below the video and thank you so much for watching today