Soil, Gardens, and the people who love them.

This past lab was an introduction into the world of soil science, and to do this we went to the Centenary United Methodist Church across the street from Mercer University.

With a few soil sampling tools, we headed to a small grassy field covered in red ants to dig some holes and take some soil samples. Using our soil consistency chart, we were able to determine the overall sand-clay-soil content, we dug down to the clay layer, and we took some core samples with a "Split Spoon Corer" of the field in order to better view the various layers. The field itself was of very rich soil with a thick clay deposit about a foot underneath. *I haven't been given pictures of that day from my classmates yet, so no fun pictures*

After we were done exploring and sampling the soil, we put it into a Sieve to learn about grain size in soil. A sieve is a tool used to separate different soil particules using mesh screens. The screens are numbered Dxx, where the xx is equal to the percentage of soil that will pass through the sieve. Unfortunately when we went to dig it had just rained, so a lot of the soil we attempted to sift through just clumped into little balls at the top and very little of it made it to the bottom tiers.

After our sieving we took a quick trip to the conveniently placed community garden nearby, where we talked about a few of the challanges facing community gardens. One of the major challanges is Lead, which is a common contaminant in the soil of urban areas. For this reason, the community garden had raised beds for their plants, effectively separating their plants from the lead contamination. Another round with the split spoon corer revealed an extremely thick soil that a few people had trouble getting all the way through. The difficulty was revealed after I was able to actually get the corer down in to the ground, as I brought up my core tool I realised we had a white layer that was thick and difficult to get through. Dr. Rood revealed it to be kaolin, an essential trade mineral here in Georgia thats used for a plethora of things. *More pictures of us with our core samples*

Overall this was a great foray into the world of soil sciences, and as always with Dr. Rood we made sure to get our hands dirty.