3 SIMPLE Soil Tests Anyone Can Do At Home for FREE

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel in today's episode I'm going to be giving you a few simple ways to test your soil right at home so you can know what the quality of your soil is and what you need to fix let's go so just like they tell you that a healthy body serves with a healthy diet you are what you eat right that also applies to the garden and your garden starts with healthy soil now healthy soil should be kind of the Goldilocks of the three things that we find in soil which is sand silt and Clay now sand silt and Clay are what makes up Olive soil there's also known as organic matter which is a fourth thing that you'll find sometimes in soil but having a good balance of sand silt and Clay is vital to having healthy soil and the reason why is if you have too much sand it's going to drain too freely it's going to dry out too fast if you have too much clay it's going to compact it's going to hold on to water too long and if you have too much silt it's going to simply be very dusty it's not going to hold on to water very well because it's actually very hydrophobic the water is going to Simply bead and run away it's also very lightweight meaning it can blow away if you have high winds and stuff like that so having the kind of Goldilocks scenario of just enough but not too much and you want a good ratio of those three things sand silt and clay and so these soil tests that I'm going to give you are basically ways that you can test the amount of sand silt and clay in your garden alright so the first way you can test your soil is through what's known as the site smell field test basically you can use your senses to tell what good soil actually is you can use your eyes to look at the soil you can use your nose to smell the soil and you can use your fingers to feel the soil and through those three systems you should be able to basically be able to tell what your the quality of your soil actually is so the first way is through the site test and you should be able to look at the color of your soil now you want to look at dry soil because dry soil will be a far different color than wet soil here our soil we just flipped this over we just harvested our potatoes it's a little bit damp we just had some rain so it's pretty dark but once this dries out it's going to change color and when you look at dry soil this is dry soil it should still retain a lot of that dark color a dark color is the presence of broken down organic matter that means that there's fertility in your soil if it's very gray super super gray it's going to be void of a lot of that life now if it's really really dark that's totally fine you know you can't really ever get too dark on soil but you can get too light like it looks very chalky or very like uh well like like Pottery you know if you've ever worked with clay and like I'm going back to like third grade clay class um you know when you're playing with Clay it's very very light gray so the lighter the color the lighter the shade the less fertility there's going to be and so just look for some dark dark colors and you're going to be good now you want to combine that with the smell test the smell test should tell you if your soil is rich in fertility and rich in organic material because if you smell it it should smell like a forest floor now there's some other things you can pick up on soil that's heavier in Clay is going to smell rather metallic and so metallic soil is high in minerals right Clay is very very high in minerals but too much too much clay and you're going to have an imbalance right it's all about the Goldilocks scenario of just enough clay just enough silt and just enough sand and so a very metallic smelling soil could be the presence of too much clay could be it's not guaranteed but it could be and so that will be confirmed in the field test but if your soil smells very uh very methanee right like kind of like a swamp that could be the presence of way too much uh way too much clay as well because methane is gathered through moisture that's trapped in the soil and basically there's bacteria that break down uh in an environment that is void of oxygen they break down things like roots and leaves and whatnot and that methane is the gas that's trapped in the clay layer so if your soil smells kind of Swampy or boggy that also could be a presence of too much clay because generally that will mean that there's not enough aerobic movement in your soil so the smell test means a lot and it indicates if you have really good aerobic activity a very good loose rich soil and a soil that's that's you know high in organic material now the fuel test is just as the name implies you're going to actually pick up your soil you want to pick up some soil and put it in between your thumb and your other fingers and basically roll it back and forth and once that soil has fallen between your fingers you're left with what's on your fingers that's the most important component is what's left on your fingers because you're not going to really gather a whole lot you might be able to feel some aggregate some Pebbles some uh some chunks of wood and stuff as it's falling through that's fine you can feel that but the texture that's left on your fingers is the most important and that's going to tell you if your soil is very Sandy very silty or very clay it's very high in clay and so basically what I'm feeling for is I'm feeling for grittiness right that grittiness is sand I'm feeling for uh kind of a a fluffiness almost like powdered sugar right that's going to be siltiness and then I'm also feeling for sliminess or slipperiness which is which is clay and so I'm feeling for that in my uh between my fingers now if you have a hard time feeling that slipperiness sometimes what's nice is getting a little bit of water and actually putting it into some water because that's going to actually activate some of that clay which might feel a little slippery see I just changed the the moisture content and the texture changed right so uh try it dry and try it wet see if you can tell a difference see I'm feeling far less grittiness now than I was I'm feeling some greediness which is good that's the presence of sand but I'm feeling a little bit more slipperiness that slipperiness is the sign is the presence of clay and that's actually really good in your soil you want to actually have Clay in your soil believe it or not now if you're going with just pure compost we'll talk about that later but in us in a garden that is basically uh like a native soil combined with compost Garden you should have the presence of clay that means you can have lots of minerals and minerals are very very good in your soil just about having not not too much of them right so there is some slipperiness to it that's a sign of uh some some clay but also um the siltiness is going to be present when organic material breaks down so I know that there's going to be some silt in there as well all right so the second way of testing your soil is by getting a mason jar of water and actually testing the and measuring the percentage which is going to give you a very accurate measurement of what's actually in your soil so what you need to do is basically pick the place where you're going to test your soil I recommend testing from several different locations because it's going to give you a better idea of the overall composition of your soil because there can be spots with more sand there can be spots with more clay and so it's going to give you a good all-around average so what I'm going to do is I'm going to scrape away about an inch or two of soil you don't want to test the top of your soil because if you test the top of your soil it's going to actually not have the same composition as what your plant roots are actually coming in contact with generally the top of your soil is going to have a lot more silt and potentially a lot more sand than down lower and so it's going to give you just a better sample size so get a little bit of soil tablespoon or so come over here scrape it get about a tablespoon or so I can come over here you don't really have to it doesn't really matter necessarily where you're getting your samples from just making sure that they're tested sporadically throughout your garden about two inches below the soil surface right come over here we can get some more soil and making sure that the sample sizes are roughly about the same same amount for each location right and then what we're going to do is we're going to throw the lid on and we're going to shake it up now through shaking what's going to happen is it's actually going to emulsify all of the three you're going to have the sand silt and the clay as well as the organic material which we'll talk about but it's going to emulsify everything into the water and what it's going to do is going to settle out because settling occurs based on particle size the larger particles are going to be lower and then the finer particles and the lighter particles the less dense particles are going to be higher all right so after about five minutes or so you're going to start to see stuff settle out almost immediately now you're really going to get a good sample by letting this set about 24 hours and basically what you're going to find are three different bands and what you can do is you can actually measure those bands now it's recommended that you measure in centimeters even if you're here in the states and you don't use the metric system the centimeters is going to be a very accurate measurement of your soil layers and so what you're going to find is the first layer is going to be your sand layer and then your middle layer is going to be your silt layer and then your top layer is going to be your clay now the La is still mixed in with the water that's why it looks pretty chocolatey but that chocolate milk is eventually going to turn clear and that top is going to be the clay so it's going to form sand silt and clay and then basically what you can do is you can take a ruler and you can measure those individual bands and so if our measurement keeping math very simple let's say we measured this out here and it was about four centimeters total right you're measuring the sand silt and Clay total right from the bottom to the top what you're going to do is you're going to measure just the sand layer and you're going to divide that from the total so if my sand layer was let's say two centimeters out of four centimeters you're going to find that 50 percent doing basic math 50 of your soil is sand then you're going to come up and you're going to measure the top layer and that or the the middle layer right the the clay layer and let's say it's one centimeter keeping that simple because I don't want to mess up here on camera but let's let's say that it's just one centimeter right one out of four is 25 percent and then if you measure the top layer let's say the top layer is is another uh you know centimeter or so you're going to find that that's 25 percent silt and uh or 25 clay sorry so you're having 50 sand 25 clay and 25 silt now those percentages don't really indicate a whole lot until you look at a soil pyramid so once you have the percentage of sand silt and clay from your water test you can actually use those to compare them on what's known as a soil pyramid now if you've never seen a soil pyramid before it's incredibly helpful at actually deciding what type of soil you actually have and so it's a road map because there are lines on the soil pyramid based on the percentages of those three different ingredients so you have a silt line you have a sand line and you have a clay line and what you're going to do is you're going to basically go to the percentage of clay first that's the bottom you want to start at the bottom and each point on the pyramid is 100 and so you start on the bottom and you move to the left of the pyramid basically finding out what percentage of clay you have in our soil we have about 30 percent clay then you want to go to the sand column or the sand side and you want to follow that line down and in our soil we have about 40 sand and then you go over to the silt side and the silt side is going to be what percentage of silt you have and in our soil we have roughly about 30 percent silt in our garden and so we can follow that line across and the point in which all three lines intersect they won't always perfectly intersect but the point in which they roughly intersect gives you a quadrant or like a a little bubble within the pyramid that tells you if you have sandy soil silty soil clay soil or a combination of any of those three you can have sandy loam which is a basically a loam is basically a perfect combination the ideal combination of all three of those then you have sandy loam you have Clay loam you have silty loam you have Sandy clay you have silty sand there's so many different variables but that is based on what you your percentages come up with and from there you can actually find out what you need to be adding to your soil to get to that perfect loam ratio the loam is the ideal kind of soil quality for what's known as an in-ground stable Garden so the thing is is that if you're growing with just compost like I talked about you're going to find that yes there will be some sand silt and clay found in your soil naturally you're going to have Clay coming up from below your beds and stuff like that but pure compost is going to be a bit of a different style Garden because it's mostly organic matter right but if you're growing a traditional Garden where you're rototilling or if you just double dig your beds or you're growing in ground like right in ground and you're not bringing any artificial soil or not artificial but you're not bringing any like outside soil in or if you're a farmer growing on several Acres these things are what matters the organic material which we'll talk about is completely separate from this soil you want to ideally aim for a loam soil that's what you want to aim for so once you know what type of soil you have the next question is well what do I do about it if it's not ideal and so what you can do is you can amend your soil now amending your soil is basically just changing the characteristic of your soil and so if you have too much sand in your soil you might think to yourself well I need to add a lot more clay or a lot more silt to my soil where does where do I get clay and where do I get silt well you clay and silt from outside sources you can Source them pretty easily from different landscaping companies we'll have something like a like a fill dirt or a topsoil which has a higher clay content the fertility is not going to be there as much as the water retention will be so this also is assuming you're not going with just compost compost has excellent water retention but compost can be very incredibly expensive and so what you want to sometimes go with if you're going on the cheap is you want to go with something that is in inferior quality in terms of fertility but Superior at water retention and so you can find clay or clay containing soils from basically uh you know from a landscaping company or you can go there and actually do this test to test you can do this site feel smell test on their soil you can do the water test on their soil or they might even tell you yeah our soil has a little higher clay content in it and that's what you want to be adding into your soil to increase the overall water holding capabilities because Clay is an excellent material at holding water aside from organic material which we'll talk about I know all you guys are getting excited on the edge of your seats when is he going to talk about organic material I will but when it comes to just what we are given in our soil right the dirt of our soil the clay can hold on to the moisture but then there's also something like sand well what if I have really sandy soil uh right what if I have really silty soil sand you don't want to add clay right away to sand otherwise you're going to make what's known as concrete right so you don't want to do that you want to add silt right but silt doesn't just come from anywhere it comes from compost it comes from broken down fully decomposed organic material that's where the silt comes from and silt is incredibly important in the garden because silt contains the fertility and so for that if you have very sandy soil I would recommend adding something like compost if you have a lot of clay well you shouldn't add sand to increase the drainage you should add compost to break up the clay first to add the silt and then if you want to add some sand later you can add sand to your garden absolutely once you have the soil texture where it should be and this the uh the uh the compost will actually break up those clay particles to actually loosen the clay naturally all right and the third way you can test your soil is by doing what's called the ribbon test now the ribbon test is a really simple way that you can find out just kind of how much clay relatively you have in your soil because clay and sand are both bad things too much sand is a bad thing and too much Clay is a bad thing so this is really just finding out if you at least have somewhere in kind of that Goldilocks scenario of those three it's not going to give you an exact by any means but it's going to give you a pretty close so what you want to do is you want to dig down about two inches as I've done take some soil right you want to take roughly about an ounce of soil about an ounce you want to add some water to that just enough water not so it's muddy but just so it's it's clumpy a little bit muddy I made it a little bit too muddy but basically what you're going to do it's not a problem if it's muddy either it's just it gets Messier so what you're going to do is you're going to form it into a ball and this ball is about one inch in diameter then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that ball and I'm going to run it through my hands and if you can form a ribbon that ribbon it's going to look a little bit like a turtle be honest but that ribbon if it's longer than three inches in length before it breaks you have too much clay if it breaks before you even get a chance to make a ribbon you have too much sand so if it breaks right away that means you have very sandy soil if it breaks before you hit three inches that means you have kind of like a clay loam somewhere in that clay loam category now I'm having a really hard time getting it to three inches I'll be honest because my soil is basically clay loam it's basically uh loam or clay loam somewhere right in there and what I'm finding is that it is incredibly challenging to get it to that three inch mark it just constantly wants to break on me now how now how far you get indicates the percentage of clay right so if it was sand it would just break apart completely too much and also you can tell look at the color difference right if I do if I do this versus this you can see there's a lot more look at the color difference too so a little bit of fun to get your hands in the dirt kind of just give you a rough idea that's pretty fun that's another ribbon test all right so those are the three ways you can test your soil's composition I know I've been hinting at talking about organic material throughout this entire episode and basically I'm going to end with the fact that organic material is separate completely separate from Sand silt and Clay a lot of gardeners want to Simply focus on how much organic material is in their garden and that's great if you can bring in or generate enough compost that you don't even have to worry about sand silt and clay that is fine a garden that is made with purely compost is completely separate from Sand silt and Clay yes the worms will bring up native soil which does contain the sand silt and Clay yes you may dig in and incorporate your native soil in with a shovel double dig and you may incorporate the sand silt and clay at that point that may become something you're going to consider but if you're bringing in compost or you're generating compost all the time you're constantly topping off your beds and maintaining them this these three tests don't really mean a whole lot because compost is totally separate from Sand silt and clay and the reason why is because compost is organic material and scientists soil scientists have said that a soil that is found to be about 10 organic material content should have enough organic material that the sand Sultan clay become irrelevant so that's the big thing it's the big takeaway that you need to learn from this is that sand silt and Clay are found in every single soil or can be found in every single soil but is they're not as important if you have organic material but if you don't have enough organic material you do need to find out what percentage of sand silting Clay is in your soil because that will have a huge effect on how your plants grow how your soil behaves and when you water how much you should be watering when you should be watering it really is the foundational building block to having a healthy garden so I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and let me know in the comments box down below what method you use to test your soil's composition and if it worked for you so as always thank you guys so much and grow bigger take care bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 27,405

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: VYsoDuIgrNg

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023