Activities involving plants and gardening may seem very limited once the cold weather sets in. But unless the ground in your neck of the woods is frozen solid, here is a fun and easy activity you can do with your kids to test the soil in your own backyard.
Professional soil tests will take samples from several different locations in your yard, but it really isn’t necessary for this simple test. The objective here is to give your kids some idea of soil content and differences in soil type. It might be fun for you to collect from multiple places. (With permission, of course!) Besides your own yard, ask about collecting from the yard of friends or family, a place of business, a city park, a nature preserve, etc. Then make comparisons!
Start with a quart-size Mason jar. Collect a sample of soil, preferably from 2 to 4 inches below ground surface, enough to fill the jar halfway. Break up any clods so that you have a reasonably even-textured sample.
Pour water over the soil to fill the jar, leaving about 1-inch of head-space.
Screw on a lid and then shake, shake, shake until the mixture is mostly smooth. Place your jar on a flat surface and let it rest for 24 hours. The resulting layers of settled soil will give you some indication of your soil type.
The sand in your soil will sink to the bottom of the jar. The layer just above it will be silt, and the top layer will be clay. You’ll also see other organic material, (pieces of root, wood, grass, leaves, etc.,) on the surface of both the water and the settled soil.
The layer of silt doesn’t show up well in my photos, but it is there! It is only slightly darker in color than the sand layer, and it makes up about 10% of our soil sample. We have nearly equal percentages of clay and sand, so around 45% of each in our soil. You may have vastly different results with your own sample. You may even see an enormous difference between various soil samples from your own property!
So once you know a little more about your soil, what do you do with the information?
Knowing the type of soil you have will help you determine which plants will grow best there. If you would like to try a vegetable or flower garden come spring, knowing what plants will grow best in your soil can help you start planning now.
Here are a few plants that grow well in each soil type:
- Clay — Aster, iris, Black-Eyed Susan, coneflower, daylily, hosta, and sedum all thrive in clay soil. Beans, broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower, peas, and potatoes all grow well in clay soil, too.
- Silt — Butterfly bush, crocus, daffodil, fern, hosta, and roses will flourish in silty soil. As for vegetables, virtually anything that grows well in clay or sandy soil will thrive in silty soil as well. It is generally very fertile soil.
- Sand — Iris, Black-Eyed Susan, daylily, lavender, phlox, salvia, and sedum grow well in sandy soil. Root vegetables like carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and radishes grow very well in sandy soil, as does corn, lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and squash.
If you want to broaden your gardening scope, you can also use your soil sample to plan for soil amendments to be implemented come spring:
- Clay — Add compost or peat moss, or even coarse sand
- Silt — Add coarse sand, compost, or aged manure
- Sand — Add aged manure, peat moss, compost, or grass clippings
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So get the kids outside! This is a fun, simple, and educational project that can be done even in the dead of winter. All you need is ground that is warm and soft enough for a little dirt collection!
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