Soil Permeability Testing

well here I am in my garage today we need to do some soil testing [Music] and when I say soil testing what we're really talking about here is we want to find out how permeable the soil at the bottom of the hole that I dug out at the farm is why of course because we want to dig a pond and we want to know what the likelihood is that that pond is going to fill with water and hold water once we do fill it so let's take a look at what we're doing behind me here so let's take a look at our ingredients for our soil test so first of all we have some grout this is just your typical pea gravel go to Home Depot or Lowe's you know whatever your favorite Home Improvement store is buy a bag of pea gravel this surprisingly enough is dirt literally from the bottom of the hole that I dug out there take a bunch of dirt just you know put it in a big bucket and brought it home so that I could do the soil test and this is my soil testing bucket you know really very high tech and anything like that really just just a five gallon bucket from the store and what we've done to this five gallon bucket you can see down here is that all along the bottom at about roughly one inch you know it's not perfect I didn't measure but we've drilled holes all along the bottom and we've filled this Barrel up to roughly about here with that gravel then the rest of it from here up to about here is filled with dirt and then of course Very shockingly we put water on top of that and what we've done is we put water on top and then we compact it down so you kind of put the dirt in here get it wet and as you put it in you know I put it in you know layers of about you know a couple inches at a time get that wet you know compacted down and then you know put another layer on until you get to the height and we wanted a good height here because realistically out uh you know on the pond in the pond area and stuff we're going to end up putting you know we're gonna have this dirt at roughly uh you know 10 to 12 inches thick or so so we want to test it you know roughly 10 to 12 inches thick or so on the bucket so uh what kind of dirt is this so this is dirt from like I said the bottom of the hole it's very heavily clay it is black it's a black clay I think they call it the port clay but anyway it's from the bottom of the hole and so what we'll do when we dig the pond we'll Dig Down we'll form the area and then we'll take this uh this heavier clay that's down there as opposed to the stuff that's on the top surface of the ground we'll take this heavier clay that's down there and we'll you know put it up around the pond kind of like a liner spread it around and kind of line the pond with it so we want to know how well it holds water well to test that we took this bucket and we feel that you can actually see on the side of the bucket here where the line was it's right about here where we filled it to on this bucket and what I read was that you should fill the bucket with water and leave it for a day to let the soil soak up the water and then fill it again and then leave it for a week and if it loses less than an inch in a week then it's perfectly good soil to use for a pot well the way this worked is I filled it up and left it and came out the next day and it really hadn't gone down much at all so I left it alone and here is where it is about two weeks later this is actually two and a half weeks later and two and a half weeks later it's actually slightly less than an inch down from what it started at so we're going to say that that's perfectly good enough and we're going to be perfectly fine using the soil for our pot so that's my soil test I'm pretty happy with the result it means that I don't have to go looking for some other kind of soil or try to bring in truckloads of some other kind of clay or something like that the soil I've got is plenty impermeable to make the bottom and the liner for the pond so that's good nice to not have to buy something else so anyway coming up soon we'll be digging our pond and getting that video up so until then we'll see you soon foreign

Channel: Sandbox Ranch

Views: 28

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Id: MrFfdVXDXjY

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023