Show #02/7902. Gardening Help Right At Your Fingertips

Taking A Soil Sample

Eric thinks one of the many tangible services that extension offers people is soil analysis. Why is it important that we know what's in our soil? James comments that unhealthy plants are more susceptible to disease, insects and weeds. So any problem might go back to the soil. Having a soil test lets you start from the ground up, helping you solve your problem.

The main parameters or one of the biggest parameters that they're going to look at is pH, below seven being acidic, above seven being alkaline.

Eric wants to go through the process of taking a soil sample and have James talk to us about what we should be doing when we're pulling our samples and the best way to get the best results. James shows us a bag from the University of Georgia that they will send to the lab in Athens. We need only about a cup and a half of soil, we really don't need that much soil to do a test, the representativeness of a sample is important. You're asking a question of your environment. What does this soil need? We need to think about how to get a representative sample. How to lay out this experiment in the right way. And one of those questions is going to be where you collect the sample. We're collecting a sample today in this bed, and we're thinking about how do I manage this bed? I'm not going to divide it in half and do one part. I'm going to treat the whole bed the same. This could be different in your yard though. You may have areas that are flower beds, you may have lawn, you may have a vegetable garden. So all these are going to be managed differently and you want to take that into consideration. Consider taking multiple samples when you're going to be managing your landscape in different ways. A vegetable garden is different from a lawn, is different from a flower bed.

The other thing we want to look at is the recommendations and the interpretation of the results. What are you trying to grow? Another thing is dependent on what you're trying to grow, thus the depth at which you're getting the soil. We're going to use a spade today, which is a great tool to use. We really don't need to go that deep. For turf, we're looking at about four inches, if you're looking to get the soil right for your lawn, the relevant soil depth is about four inches. For a vegetable garden like we're going to do in this raised bed, it's going to be about six inches down in the soil. So we want to go down about six inches. James is using a bucket, you could use anything to collect the soil. We'll do about three or four places in this bed, thus we're sub sampling that way. The results are representative of the entire bed, the whole environment. From that, we'll just mix it up and then pour it into the bag.