Soil Testing

A soil test gives you a good idea what your soils need to be healthy and productive. they are an important tool for farmers. And yet this is something we have not done on this farm until now.

Why haven't we done soil testing? Partly because it is a pain in the ass to do. It is not hard to take soil samples but it is time consuming to do, even the 2 tests we did involved taking 30 soil samples which took around 3 hours. Partly because we had some many other things to do on this farm such as putting in thousands of perennials, opening up 250+ beds, etc., etc.. So soil testing was put on the back burner.

But last November after attending the Wisdom of Berries workshop in Columbus we decided it was rather important that we get some testing done on our soil to see where we are. And it helped that we got information for a well recommended soil lab in Washington Court House, OH.

So Sunday enough snow had melted that we could go out and take soil samples and that is how we spent our Sunday afternoon

Eugene is clearing away the top 2" of soil with a pointing trowel (which he used for archaeology projects)

Plunging the soil probe 6 inches into the soil

A soil sample

Sample goes into the bucket where it will be mixed with other samples from the area. here Eugene is using his trowel to get the soil out of the probe. We quickly learned to use a finger to push the dirt out of the probe

Another soil sample. I believe there was a bit of contamination at the top of this sample and Eugene is knocking that off so it does not go in with the other samples and thus contaminate the batch

Samples ready to ship to Spectrum Analytics

We sent these samples off Tuesday and should have the results by early next week. I will endeavour to scan the results and post them here.