Hi, my name is Leif Albertson I work at the cooperative extension service for
the University of Alaska Fairbanks and I'm out in Bethal today. I had some
questions about the turf on the field here and so I'm helping the city take
some soil samples were gonna send in and see if we can't help make the field a
little bit greener this year.
So since this is a really large area, we're going to take a number of samples.
We'll probably do about five samples today because we really want to get an idea of sort of what the average
soil is like here.
Once we do that we have that sample, we're going to send it into a lab. They're going to look at the nutrients there.
And they can make a recommendation that we can pass back to the city on how to improve the turf
that they've got. So I'm doing here is a man take about five samples from around
the fields we get a good sense of the average soil
we'll send that into the lab and they'll tell us about the nutrients.
First thing I'm gonna wanna do here going do here is making a d-shaped hole,
so I can get a nice slice of soil here, so we got a nice clean edge here.
and I'm gonna wanna take about an inch off there. You don't need that much.
I'm just gonna try to take a nice sliver of soil there.
Looks just like that.
And then, we're gonna wanna take, about a one inch column right in the middle.
And for turf like this we only need about the top 4 inches to do that.
And now we have kind of a nice column of soil
that should be a good sub-sample.
We're going to take that and were going to
put that in the bucket with our other samples.
Eventually we'll mix them all together.
I'm just using a hand trowel here
if the soils is real loose you can use your fingers.
Cut through that turf on top
and there you have a pretty good soil sample.
What we're going to do next is mix up the sub-samples
that we've got into one sample.
We want to mix everything in there really good.
and we're gonna start by, you know we dont- we dont actually need the grass on top there
that'll just mess up our sample.
Um...but we're gonna get in there and really mix it all together
so that we got a good uh...
mixture of uh, soil from the whole field.
Now I'm just using my hands and breaking up the soil clumps.
We dont need the grass in there.
If we got some organic matter on top its okay.
Roots and everything.
But the thing to remember is that when they do
put the soil sample in the machine its a very tiny amount
so we wanna make sure that everything
is mixed up really good.
Otherwise we might get a misleading sample
or if we didnt take enough sub-samples
we took a sample from a place that we sandier
or wetter or maybe had some runoff or something it might give us misleading
results. We want like a really good mixture from all over our space.
Okay so we mixed up all our samples pretty good
in this clean bucket
we don't want to use a dirty bucket it could give us a
misleading sample and we're gonna take about a pint
that soil, put it in a plastic bag to get back to the office where we'll dry it out.
A lot of the information that I got for this came right of our cooperative extension soil sampling publication.
So if you cant remember it all we've got this availible online or from your local
extension agent and it lays it out pretty clearly. We're gonna head back to
our office now and what we're gonna need to do is dry the sample out of the soil.
Laboratories like to get them dry if theyre wet it can change change the sample and give
us results said won't be as good.
What im going to do when I'm done here is I'm going to clean this bucket out in case I need to use it on any other
soil samples I don't wanna leave that dirt in their if I go sample from a garden
or anything, that might give misleading results to the people that are using the
bucket after me for soil sampling. So we're back in the office and the next day are going to
do here is were gonna take our soil pint of soil that we mixed up here
and were just going to let it dry. We dont want to heat it up too much
when we dry it, that can change the chemistry of the soil so we're just gonna dry it and room temperature.
I'm putting it on a plastic tray here and spreading it out.
But we'll just let it sit over night and see how it looks tomorrow
break up some of these clumps
and if it looks dry tomorrow we'll put it back in the bab and send it off to a soil lab.
It's really important that we want to send our dried soil away in a bag want to
really communicate with them where this came from what we want to do it and so
the most important thing is we have to label the bag especially for sending in
multiple samples they don't just get bag of dirt and not know what to do with it.
A lot of labs will ask you specific questions,
they'll have something like a soil sample information sheet.
It'll ask you what your growing amendments added or you might
want to add and help them do the best they can with the sample that you've sent them
and give you the best results
the most useful results they can so what you have your soil and everything is
labeled you need to select a soil lab there's places all over the country that
do this and you know whatever you want to choose is fine.
After you send your sample in you'll get soil sample results
and if you're not used to reading those it can just look like a list of numbers
it might not make sense so thats a where you could bring that
into your cooperative extension agent they can help you interpret those results and give you
some useful recommendations based on it, to add lime or nitrogen or a specific fertilizer what
to do to to grow best you can.
My name is Laif Albertson I work for the cooperative extension service thorugh the
University of Alaska Fairbanks hope these simple tips about soil sampling
will help you and if you have any questions about growing in your part of
the state you can contact your local district extension agent.