Patti Moreno: I’ve wanted to test out my soil for such a long time so I’ve brought a soil expert Mark Hyland here to take me through the process of testing my soil. Thank you so much for being here.
Mark: Yes, absolutely.
Patti Moreno: So, what do you think so far?
Mark: I like what I am seeing. It looks lush and lots of organic matter. The plants look great. They are obviously growing fast, nice and green.
Patti Moreno: Awesome! All right, let’s take a scoop. Take a scoop at this soil in here. Is there sort of a proper way should we be testing the top layer or middle?
Mark: Well, we’re going to dig in. We are going to start by moving all the mulch aside since we have the cocoa shell mulch—
Patti Moreno: Okay.
Mark: We’re going all that aside and you want to get just the soil. So, yes just clear away all that mulch and I kind of—I would go so far, to really make sure that it’s just soil.
Patti Moreno: There’s no—okay.
Mark: That’s it. That’s it, yes. We’ll get all that cocoa shell mulch out of the way. So, get a little bit of the soil out for the test.
Patti Moreno: All right.
Mark: So, you only need a small handful for the type of test we’re going to do here. So, let’s get a little bit more. And you were asking me about the depth. And the depth that we’re taking out is great because these veggies are basically kind of shallow-rooted so we’re taking it from the region where everything would be rooting. So, we got basically four inches down here.
Patti Moreno: What kind of some of the test that you can do, the site test to see if you have good soil?
Mark: Well, visual inspection is definitely justifiable and that’s your number one, because what you can see with your eyes and feel with your hands that, definitely is going to tell you, “Am I going to choose to pick out in this garden or is it floppy like this stuff. And you can just slide right into it.
So, first is visual. You can feel soil with your hands since we want to use this for the soil test but you and try to squeeze it. And then in your hand, it falls back up because you barely touch it. It falls apart like this. That’s a sign of really good soil because poor soils would stick together. It would still look like a little ball in your hand especial if it was high in clay. And this is very loamy. It falls back apart easily. You can see the organic matter in the soil. That’s a good thing.
A really good soil, you can see organic matter in it. Good soil is going to be a dark color. It is chocolaty brown—a lot of people say the mixture of chocolate cake and if you look at this that’s pretty much what you have here. Probably you’d pretty much have chocolate cake. It breaks apart nice and easily and another good sign of good soil, I just took a little handful. So, if I let it fall apart we still have chunks. That’s a really good sign. It means that you have the organic microflora that’s making all the little compounds. It’s going to bind the soil together and make macro pores, micro pores, hold more moisture. So, loam is what you’re shooting for in the garden, in a veggie garden especially so that’s what you have right here. So, that’s the kind of hand inspection.
And then you can do a couple of simple chemical test, pH is a big one. We all know we got a lime soils occasionally and pH tells you when you need to do that. So, pH affects nutrient release in soils.
Patti Moreno: All right so we’ve got our soil here that we’re going to test. So, we need some water. How much water should we add to this?
Mark: So, we got the one cup of soil. And that’s probably three—well, that’s probably two cups of water so we could probably even put one more cup in there. So, we have a little 3:1 ratio going on three parts of water, one part of soil, perfect. This little test gets really handy because they are so easy to use.
Patti Moreno: This is definitely something that I’m going to do with my daughter because she loves doing little group of scientific experiments and this seems like one that is good to do with kids.
Mark: We’re going to open it up almost and kind of put the powder
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