How To Test Your Soil And Site Selection

Today we are talking about the different ways that you can sample your soils and some of the techniques that are best to be used to select the site. 

How To Test Your Soil And Site Selection

First Concern

One of the first things to think of when you're taking a soil sample is the timing of the sample. That's important from the point of view that if you're testing your soil from a nutrient deficiencies point of view, or wondering what to put on your soil, then taking a sample just before the plant is at its optimum growth stage or when you're about to plant the crop, is very important as this helps you to get the timing just perfect.

Soil texture

Second Concern

The second thing to take into account is location of where you're going to take your soil samples.

For example, we want to avoid areas like roads and tracks, around watering points, along fence lines and areas like that, that are not representative of your paddock.

If you're finding that you've got some bad soil or you are finding bad germination of plants it may be important to sample in that area and also to sample in a good section of your paddock. That's an important thing to keep in mind.

If it's in an area of pasture or a plant of some description that's growing quite nicely, you might want to sample your soils where the plants are not growing well, and in an area where they're growing quite well, and to actually look at the two differences and it may help you to identify the soil issues.

Third Concern

The third thing to think about is the depths of your soil samples. Soil sampling is important and most of the nutrients are concentrated in the top 30 centimetres of your soil. It's important that we sample this area, but that if we feel issues are affecting us that are further below in the surface or into the subsoil, that we sampled to that depth as well.

A simple spade test is done by making a general hole which allows you to pull up a section of the soil profile and there we have the surface soil down into the sub-surface which is there easy for you to test for, so pH, maybe soil sodicity and also texture but some simple infused soil testing.