in this video i'm going to be looking at taking a thatch sample from my lawn
using the swardman soil probe now this is a little bit of kit that can go into the lawn
and take a section of the soil sample out so you can see what's underneath the soil
and how the composition of the thatch layer and the grass layer plus the roots looks within your
lawn i'm going to be taking a sample of my back lawn and my front lawn and taking you through
what the different samples show me and how the samples look underneath the soil
so first of all the process to take the samples quite easy you just press the soil sampler
into the ground and it leaves almost this letterbox shape in the soil you can see
my grass is a little bit browning in places plus there's lots of worm casts on the soil
i wanted to take a soil sample in this specific place of the garden
because i tend to have a little bit more disease in this area and i wanted to see what was going on
so here's what my soil sample looks like
you can see there's a few things that immediately jump out to me from looking at this soil sample
the first is the shininess of the soil surface indicates to me that there is clay in the soil
the second thing that jumps out is i've got absolutely no thatch layer in this soil at all
you can just see the top of the grass and there's hardly any thatch sitting on the soil
the lawn itself is a relatively young lawn but taking a sample like this in your own lawn can
be a great way to understand if you need further treatment such as scarification and aeration
to help break down that thatch layer the third thing that i'm going to take out of this is the
penetration of the roots in the soil you can see the roots aren't penetrating very deeply in the
soil and the soil is almost crumbling apart in my hands i think next year i'm going to work quite a
lot on soil conditioning treatments just to really push that root growth down a deep and healthy root
system is going to help me improve my lawn's appearance resistance to disease and drought
i can just drop the soil back into the place where i took it
and we'll go and take a look at the front lawn
the front lawn is looking really nice still you can see here it's a really nice green colour
and on the front of the property i get a lot more sun compared to the back
when i took the sample from the back lawn it was actually quite moist and that probably contributed
to the sample not being a full straight sample i'm expecting the sample on the front lawn to
be a little bit more compact because of the sun and there's less moisture in the soil
opening up that soil sample some of the good things i can take a look at here
is there's actually earthworms in the soil now having worms in the soil is really beneficial
because they're going to help to aerate the soil and it shows that you've got a good healthy
soil for your grass to grow in again you can see that almost shiny look
to the sample which indicates clay but this sample is much more compact
that to me is telling me there's actually less moisture and it's
draining a little bit better in this front lawn plus it's getting more sun
the roots seem to be a little bit more healthier on the front lawn and again given the time of year
i might expect that because the grass is receiving more sunlight it's a bit more free draining
in this area and the plants overall looking a little bit more healthy compared to the back lawn
so the next thing let's take a look at the soil sampler itself
this is a swardman soil probe you can find a link to
in the description below for the tool and it's quite a simple mechanism but well built
the tool i've been sent in is from garden imports and you can see you close the lid
put the pressure down onto the soil and it will pull up a little letterbox size soil sample
you can lift the front of the cover up and remove that sample and there's little lips
on the front of it that just help cut out the soil and help you get a better sample
if you're dealing with thatch in your lawn please drop me a comment down below and tell me how you
think your lawn would look if you took a sample like this and in my next video i'm going to be
taking the samples out of the seed boxes so we can see just how good the root penetration is
and if you're interested in that please like the video and subscribe to my channel you