All right here, I am with a couple of mason jars some dish soap and a garden trowel and
you may as well stick around and see what I'm planning to do with them
Hey, it's Jason here with Fraser Valley rose for sure the title ruined the suspense of what I'm gonna do today
It's a mason jar soil test to check for clay in my soil
What I want to show you here, is that my soil is quite heavy
During the summer it's clay enough that when it dries out it starts to develop those big cracks in the surface
So I treat it as a clay soil I grow things in here that are appropriate for it
But I want to show you how to do the actual physical test to see if it is a clay soil
What I'll do here just to take off the organic stuff across the top
I'm just going to scrape off the top there because having a big chunk of wood and the jar isn't gonna. Tell me anything
The next thing I'm gonna do is dig down in here and reveal the soil
And into the jar it goes can see from the surface of the soil there how
Smooth that is, and it's heavy, and it sticks together, which is my first indication that this is a clayish type soil
And keep on getting
Soil samples
Everywhere from around the region of that it's best to mix it in a little bit
hopefully get don't just get one little piece of soil from one part of the hole, but go ahead and
Get a real representative sample would like to have for this kind of test is
even up to about half of the jar and
I'll take that in and show you how to prepare it inside there
And I want to go get one more sample so follow me here in a very different spot in our garden
I want to get a different soil sample because I know from experience that
This place is a little bit rock here a little bit sand here so may as well
Take a sample run the test there at the same time
Yeah, if you feel there
Already I can feel there's gravel in there
There's rocks and that kind of thing in there. I'll sort that out a bit inside
But I have a feeling that this is gonna come up a little bit different as a result
All right the next step in our
Mason jar test for soil is to break up the soil a little bit, so I took the first sample here
The more clay sample from my estimation, and I've dumped it out into this bin here and what I'm gonna do is
I'm just going to break it up
and
part of the
Getting the best results is to
Have it completely
dissolved
into the water solution
So the more you can break it up now
And shake it up once you get it into the jar
You should be fine. You can see this one here is pretty
Homogenous that is all of the parts are pretty clayish and pretty much the same consistency
And so I don't have too many
Bits of rock or anything that looks quite different from the soil here
But once I have it all dissolved into the water and shake it up and let it settle down you should actually see some
Distinctions between the sand and the silt here and the clay type particles that are in there
so I'm going to put it back into the jar and
We'll do the next step in the test
This one is the second sample from the other jar and
Sometimes I show you as I break this one up here. That is not quite as homogenous
You can see I've got some big chunks of
Rock in here
And you can actually hear
There's a little more gravel in this soil here now. I don't think it's going to help me out a lot to determine the soil
Texture to have these big chunks of rock in there
So I will screen those out before I put that back in the jar
But this is what the second soil looks like before I begin the soil test
Here's the next step isn't gonna add
Just a little bit of dish soap
Less than a teaspoon
Into each jar
That's just to help to dissolve and suspend and divide the layers and then
Add some water
Almost to the top you just want to leave a little bit of room on the top for shaking
And for the second sample
Same deal
I'm going to apply the lids here
You can see this one used to be apparently peaches from August of 2015
And the next step here, I may take a little while to shake it up
So it might go off camera on that, but the point being that the more thoroughly this is mixed
The more suspended each of the types of soil becomes in the solution then when I set it down
It will divide
So the first thing I have to do is shake it up and do that to both here now
And I'll turn this back on in a second
I've given these a couple minutes of shaking now and actually want to show you something
Kind of interesting this was the first sample from that clay spot. I showed you
and you can hear as I'm shaking it a
little rattling as
one or two pieces of sand or gravel in the bottom
Rattle around this is the second sample from the sand to your location. I don't know if you can pick that up
But it's definitely a lot more gravel
So this is the fun part of the test you can see
That from the time I set it down
Almost immediately any gravel or sand that's in that suspension
Drops to the bottom
So what you see settling at the bottom there after five seconds even ten seconds is
All the sand and gravel in that solution
Have dropped out
This one here as well
So I'm not gonna be able to tell anything quite yet, the timeline goes like this in
The first five or ten seconds all the sand and gravel drops out
Then over the course of the next 30 minutes. You should see all of the silt drop out
But you might not even get a distinct line there because all of the clay that's in that top portion there will still be
suspended in the water and
So it's going to take
24 hours or more for all that clay to drop down into the third layer
What I'll do then is I'll take a new video for both of these samples here
And I'll show you
How much ends up being sand how much end ups ends up being silt and in the top layer how much ends up being clay?
Step two in my artificial time-lapse here
it's now being about thirty minutes since I shook the jars and within the first five minutes I
Took a sharpie here, and I marked down the rough edge of the sand layer
See it's a little bit lower in the first jar here than it is in the second jar and the next layer up here
Settling within about the first 30 minutes should be the silt layer
I'm not going to mark that quite yet
Because I think it may have some more settling to go down there as the water separates from the silt, and this top portion here
Contains some silt and some
Clay that will settle out within the next 24 hours or so and that should be in the next section I take
This is the results video
You know I've had these sitting here for about a week actually is what it came out to
Just cuz it got busy with other things. You can see that the
At the top of the jars has cleared up
Significantly it took a long time for that for all the clay particles in there to drop down and form those clay layers
At the top of the jar there, so this is the results and I'll show you how to calculate that
and
where to go to get
the texture so
what I did is I put a little mailer down at the bottom here because
the mason jars don't go right down to the surface and
On this first sample here what I found after
doing the
Doing the calculations and the counts here is that your total height on that was about 63 millimeters total
sand was 22 silt was around 30 and clay was around 11
I did the same thing on the other jar the sample from the rockier soil and
What I found there was that of a total of 61 millimeters
about
30 was sand
25 was silt and only 6 was clay so then the question becomes what does that mean?
If you're trying to figure out what the
with a scientific classification
Which texture is here's a website all actually posted along the bottom where you can just insert the?
Percentages now the percentages you would get by taking each of those layers
Depth and dividing it by the total so for instance on this first sample here to get the percentage of sand of
22
Was the layer divided by 63?
gives me a percentage of approximately 35% and you can put that into the calculator at 35 percents and
put in your clay percentage and
It will calculate out the silt percentage for you and give you a texture
classification in this case it put me right on the border of
a loam or a silty loam
Now should that surprise me?
Actually if you just asked me without doing the test like this
How does my soil behave? is it heavy? is it light? does it drain and everything else the answer
I give you is: well it acts a bit like a clay
and
What I mean by that is it's it's heavy, it's hard to dig
it's a cool in the spring and takes a long time to warm up that it's
When it dries out it gets those cracks across the top
So it acts a lot like a clay soil, and it's very fertile and moisture retentive and everything else
But when you actually take the textural analysis it ends up being a silt loam this one over here
by the same process and remember that one was the head of chunky rocks in it as I dug it out from the garden and
if you do the analysis on that one it ends up being just
straight in the area of category of loam on the sandy side
But this one here would need probably about ten percent more clay to be considered a clay
soil
And this one would need probably about five percent more sand to be considered even a sandy loam
so both of these are in the kind of loam category and
But they actually even within that group have a lot of differences between them
So I guess my takeaway on this is you don't really know the specific well at least the scientific texture of your soil
Until you do a test like this
And it could be helpful in knowing how to treat it and what amendments you could use and so on
If you have any questions about how this went or about the test or anything else or comments, please leave them below. Thank you