Soil Sampling in the Produce Garden.

Trying to get the soil sampler into a bed that hasn't been raised.

Today, we took fourteen soil samples (Beds 1 4 5 8 9 12 13 16 17 20 21 24 25 28) from the Produce Garden. We needed to do this before we started to spread manure on all the beds later this week. 

It was a "reasonable" effort to drive the soil sampler into Beds 1-8, which were the raised corn beds this year. Beds 9-16, the raised potato beds, were easy to retrieve the soil sample. The ease with which to get the samples from Beds 17-28 depended on whether we had raised the beds since the harvest of September 16. The recently raised beds were similar in effort to the corn beds. The beds that have not yet been raised proved difficult to insert the sampler. I was concerned with either breaking the horizontal plate or the vertical shaft as I levered the sampler into the ground.

When we attempted to take samples last spring (before we began raising the beds), it was very difficult to insert the sampler into the soil. Then it was almost impossible to get the sampler out of the ground. Then we couldn't get the sample out of the sampler. We gave up. Going forward, we'll take samples in the fall, and then compare them to previous years to see how we're doing.

Now we mix up the 14 samples to achieve a consistent soil mix, then select two pounds (the size of a freezer bag). That's what gets submitted to the lab for soil testing.

I'll report back once we have results.