How to collect a soil sample by Tim Davis
One of the simplest things we can do to be more productive in our gardening is a soil analysis.
Soil analysis is going to tell us our pH requirement, and it is going to tell us how to do that, so we can release more of the nutrients to make them available to the plants and it is going to give specific recommendations for the plants that you grow.
The results of a soil analysis are really only as good as sampling you take, and we need to take multiple samples, so this videos is going to show you how to take a good quality soil sample.
In this land, there are at least three separate zones that we want to look at for taking a soil sample. The first is the turf grass area, the second area is the vegetable garden and then in the third area are the Zezelias. Each of these has different needs and they are treated differently. So we are going to take separate samples for each of those.
Each of those samples, we are going to collect a number of sub-samples from those and mix them altogether so we have representative of that whole area of what does nutrition needs might be.
We do not really need very many tools for this. You can use just some sort of simple digging tool like the spade, a plastic bag or perhaps a five-gallon bucket for mixing your sub-samples.
So let us go ahead and take a soil sample. All we really need to do is dig a small hole here about four or five inches in depth. Chop it up there with a spade. And then, we are going to remove that soil, set it aside.
As you can see we got a hole in here. It is about four inches deep or so. And what we are going to do is take a sample of that—from surface to about that four-inch depth. So, we are going to pull that soil out all the way. We do not want to drop that, because that is going to tell us what the nutrients are, all the way from the top to the bottom.
And then the next step, we simply just going to take this soil and I will put it in our little mixing bag here. Now, we are going to the rest of the vegetable garden and collect our samples.
Now, let us just mix all these up that we can take—and we have a sample that we can take to the county extension office for our vegetable garden
There we go, final product.
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