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    How-To Home Soil Tests: 19 DIY Tests and Activities for Learning More About Your Soil
    How-To Home Soil Tests: 19 DIY Tests and Activities for Learning More About Your Soil
    How-To Home Soil Tests: 19 DIY Tests and Activities for Learning More About Your Soil
    Ebook93 pages29 minutes

    How-To Home Soil Tests: 19 DIY Tests and Activities for Learning More About Your Soil

    By Leigh Tate

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    About this ebook

    Offers simple at-home tests for soil texture, stability, pH, drainage, and earthworm counts. Learn how to make your own pH paper, read soil colors, and what your plants can tell you about your soil. Includes charts, tables, glossary, further resources, and why all soil lab test results are not the same. A good resource for gardeners, homesteaders, homeschoolers, and budding soil scientists.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeigh Tate
    Release dateFeb 16, 2015
    ISBN9781310121432
    How-To Home Soil Tests: 19 DIY Tests and Activities for Learning More About Your Soil
    Author

    Leigh Tate

    Leigh Tate has always loved living close to the land. From the back-to-the-land movement to the modern homesteading movement, the agrarian lifestyle is the one she says feels like home. She and her husband currently homestead five acres in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians. Their vision is to become as self-sustaining as possible by stewarding their land, animals, and resources. Leigh's homesteading activities include gardening, food preservation, foraging, raising goats, chickens, and guinea fowl, herbs, cheese making, permaculture landscaping, spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, quilting, natural dying, soapmaking, wood cookstove cookery, and renovating their old 1920s farmhouse.

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      Book preview

      How-To Home Soil Tests - Leigh Tate

      Preface

      When I published 5 Acres & A Dream The Book: The Challenges of Establishing a Self-Sufficient Homestead, I described it as neither a how-to nor a why-to book. Although it contains quite a bit of practical advice about many homesteading skills, it is mostly the story of our journey toward simpler, sustainable, more self-reliant living. The Little Series of Homestead How-Tos is a complement to that book. It is a work in progress which will eventually include all of the skills mentioned in 5 Acres & A Dream The Book and Critter Tales, plus other how-tos as well. I hope they will encourage you, my readers, toward your own self-reliant lifestyles.

      What Is Soil?

      What is soil? Dirt? Grime? Dust? Muck? If you are a gardener, soil is the medium for growing things. If you are a small child, soil is fascinatingly wonderful to play in, either dry and dusty, or wet and muddy. If you're the mother of small children, it's what you're constantly yelling at your kids to not track into the house. If you are a modern urbanite, soil is a potential carrier of disease. If you're a soil scientist, soil is roughly 45% minerals, 5% humus, 25% water, 25% air, and a vast population of soil organisms. If you're a farmer, it's your livelihood.

      Not all soil is equal. It comes in different colors, textures, structures, and consistencies. It has physical, chemical, and biological properties, and can be a fascinating subject to study. For the gardener, farmer, and homesteader, soil health and fertility are key to growing nutrient dense vegetables, fruit, and grain. Understanding our soil enables us to know what steps to take to care for it and improve it.

      In this eBook, I will show you a number of simple, do-it-yourself soil tests with which to obtain basic information about your soil. All of them are useful for any grower of plants and suitable for homeschool soil science experiments. None require fancy equipment, although I'll give you details about more intricate testing if you wish to go that route.

      How To Examine Soil Structure

      Soil structure is the arrangement of solid particles in the soil and the pore spaces between them. This is important, because this arrangement determines how well roots will grow and how easily water and nutrients will reach them. Getting a first-hand look at a slice of soil is good way to begin learning about it.

      What You'll Need

      shovel

      your eyes

      How To Do It

      Carefully use your shovel to dig down and remove a section of your soil. Try to keep it intact so

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