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| Soil Sampling – Part One |
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| Opinion | |||
| Written by Mike Epler | |||
| Tuesday, 02 February 2010 13:19 | |||
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While we’ve just spent the better part of a month covered up with snow, we shouldn’t let planning for next year’s yards, gardens and field crops get too far from our minds. Even though doing yard and field work isn’t really possible at the moment, we need to keep in mind the importance of soil sampling before spring, because that’s when we’ll be fertilizing and planting. Normally, it is recommended that soil sampling be done in the fall, but it rarely works out that way as “the best plans of men and mice often go awry.” On the bright side, there is still plenty of time to do your sampling once the weather straightens out. Because of that, I thought this week would be a good time to start addressing some common questions about soil sampling. The main question about soil sampling is why we should do it. Soil sampling is important because it’s the only way to measure levels of two essential nutrients, phosphorus and potassium. Other important soil characteristics revealed by soil testing are the soil pH and the organic matter percentage. In case you are wondering, the recommendations for nitrogen are not normally determined by a soil test since it is based off of either yield goals or the known annual nitrogen requirement of a given plant. Also, nitrogen is mobile in the soil unlike most other nutrients, so accurate sampling of it requires much deeper probing of the soil (typically 2 feet).  One of the biggest problems in soil sampling is getting a representative sample. Whether you’re in a yard, garden or an 80-acre corn field, some rules stay the same. Try to avoid unusual areas, such as ditches, waterholes or the edges of the given area. If you are going to make one sample represent one large field, you probably need to pull 10 to 15 cores in the field to create that one sample (or even one core per acre to get the best results). In a yard or garden, you may just pull five or 10 cores to make up a sample, but you still need good representation of the area being tested. Get a clean plastic bucket and mix thoroughly all the cores from a site, and then pull out a sub-sample to send for testing. Whether you are sending the sample yourself,or bringing it into the Extension office, you only need about one pint of soil for the lab to use in testing. Everything I want to mention about soil sampling/testing is too much to put in one article, so next week I’ll talk about more testing techniques and more thoughts about why we test soil samples. Remember to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of soil sampling techniques. Until then, keep in mind that if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at the Miami County Extension Office at 104 S. Brayman St. in Paola, call 294-4306, or e-mail us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
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Comments (1)
Brent Pohlman: ...
Mike
Great article on soil testing! This information should be referenced by all people looking at soil testing. I really like the information on how far down you should go to pull a sample and how you should go about collecting a representative sample. This information really needs to be communicated with respect to obtaining a quality soil sample. Brent Pohlman Midwest Laboratories http://www.midwestlabs.com 1
February 04, 2010
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