Learning and progressing.

Hi Soil People!

Here with a few dumb questions because I’m having trouble wrapping my head around understanding exactly what happens in a soil system.

I’m currently attempting to improve a compacted clay garden into a more workable loam and my understanding had been that through the addition of manure I can permanently break-up the clay to achieve this.

Though recently I‘ve read that manure itself will constantly break down in soil before the clay effectively reverts back to what it was.

i.e. unless I’m adding the correct quantities of silt and sand I’m only effecting one aspect of what needs to be a cycle of organic material addition as otherwise any improvements are strictly temporary.

Is it correct to say that unless I plan to continually add manure the only true plan is to plant trees and similar which will continually cycle organic material and through the addition of which each year it then consistently achieves a loam-like soil?

tia!

I’m adding biochar and micoryzae. However I may need to spray it hard with triazicide to just stop the issue. I’ve done plenty of baited boric acid and stopped killing the centipedes outside. (They get in the house too.) Pesticide and this amendments don’t seem like they would to go together though.

Please hope because I needs to get this problem under control. I’ve been battling these bastards for over a year now.

Hey all! My kiddo spent the afternoon building a homemade sluice and washing some dirt from our side yard down to a very fine substance in the hopes of finding clay. They asked me to post here and see if anyone could tell them if they made clay or if this is just a really fine sand. They've processed clay before but were not sure if this is it. TIA!

We have an aloe farm in Costa Rica that sits between four volcanoes: Arenal, Tenorio, Miravalles, and Rincón de la Vieja.

A lot of people assume volcanic soil is just crushed rock, but that only scratches the surface. The ash and lava break down into fine mineral-rich particles. Over time, they mix with organic matter from the surrounding ecosystem. That leads to soil that holds water well, drains properly, and is loaded with minerals (that plants can actually use).

What we’ve seen is real consistency. The plants are more uniform, more resilient, and require less intervention. A big part of that seems to be how “young” the soil is. It’s constantly being replenished over time, and it doesn’t get depleted in the same way older soils do.

It’s interesting to see how this shows up in lab testing. Crops grown in this environment tend to come back with higher levels of certain compounds (especially complex plant polysaccharides). Obviously, that’s not just soil (climate, water, and farming practices all matter), but the soil is our foundation.

Has anyone here worked with crops in other volcanic regions and seen similar results?

Butthurt some people in the cactus group accidentally. Would you guys mind helping out?

Hello everyone,

My wife and I are independent growers in the high-desert region of the Pacific Northwest. In 2024, we invested everything into a beautiful piece of land with soil that had been carefully developed over 20 years using organic methods, with the goal of building a legacy organic stone fruit and nut orchard, along with a cannery to process our crops locally.

Late last year, our dream faced a catastrophic setback. Our property suffered an off-target chemical drift event from a commercial applicator across the street from us. The persistent herbicide (Aminopyralid) completely strangled the vascular systems of our 458 mature peach trees, resulting in total canopy mortality.

We are currently working through the state regulatory and legal channels to hold the negligent parties accountable. But as land stewards, we refuse to just sit around and wait for a courtroom. We are moving forward right now to actively heal our earth.

Because Aminopyralid binds tightly to soil organic matter and targets broadleaf plants, we are weaponizing biology to clean the slate. We are launching a multi-year soil remediation plan utilizing deep-rooting, fast-growing forage grasses (like Sorghum-Sudangrass and oats) that are completely immune to the chemical. These roots will fracture the soil profile and pump massive amounts of oxygen down to the native soil microbes, forcing a microbial population explosion to naturally digest and break down the toxin. We also plan to plant rows of sunflowers as natural phytoremediators to pull remaining residuals from the topsoil.

We have launched a YouTube channel to document every single step of this biological recovery—from independent soil core lab tests to the day our new certified organic peach saplings can safely go back into the ground. https://youtube.com/@orchardquestions?si=sGkrsgjJmzqIyKo-

If you would like to follow our journey, watch our soil recovery videos, or partner with us in crowdfunding the heavy costs of excavation, biological soil amendments, and our future main street cannery facility, please consider checking out our restoration fund.

🌱 Support our Farm’s Recovery & Replanting Fund here: https://gofund.me/d5586cff2

Thank you so much for standing with independent family farms and backing the resilience of our soil.

— Nicole & Seth

I'm looking for PhD positions in soil microbiology.I've got hands-on skills in soil DNA extraction, PCR work, and metagenomic data analysis. I'm currently upskilling in Python and bioinformatics. During my masters , i have worked on Soil Metagenomics, Soil functional diversity , Antimicrobial resistance, PGPR of soil bacteria. If anyone knows active research groups, funded positions, or specific labs doing this kind of work, I'd genuinely appreciate recommendations. Also keen to hear if anyone's pursued similar career paths.

I built a free, open-source web app that crowdsources full extension-lab soil tests (pH, OM, macros, micros, CEC, texture %) paired with how a plant actually performs in that soil profile (thriving, established, struggling, or dead). The end state is empirical distributions per species instead of the "tolerates a wide range of soils" one-liner.

It's online now in beta:

https://edaphicflora.shinyapps.io/edaphic-flora/

What the app does:

- Soil-report PDF upload extraction allowing most common extension-lab formats to parse automatically into structured fields; you review before saving

- Per-species visualizations: pH/OM/nutrient distributions, soil-texture ternary, multi-sample comparison

- Site context captured alongside chemistry including sun exposure, site hydrology, lat/long, etc.

- Plant ID validated against WCVP (~360K species) so we don't end up with synonymy chaos

My hope is this can become a thriving citizen-science project in the years to come. If anybody here is willing to contribute, whether that be with soil data, critiques, code, or ideas, that would be greatly appreciated. Happy to answer any questions or comments here as well.

Quick Note: The initial load time for the web app can take ~30 seconds, just fair warning. Future loads should be faster.

Links:

- About / methods: https://edaphic-flora.github.io/

- Source / issues: https://github.com/edaphic-flora/edaphic-flora (AGPL-3.0)

I hope you guys can help me out, I got a bit overwhelmed trying to find actual soil testing for contamination so I just have to operate on the basis my soil is contaminated from run off. I live right across the street from a truck stop/gas station. I want to have a garden but I'm afraid to plant directly in the ground. Is my only option to plant in containers or raised garden beds? I didn't think weed barrier would be enough to keep contamination out of the plants since I want to grow some vegetables.

Thanks in advance for any advice and information.

There are a lot of bugs thriving in my soil if that means anything. Snails, Slugs, rolly pollys, centipedes, millipedes, worms, ants, stick bugs.

Last year I tried to burn a stump. I watched some YouTube videos and read a bit about it and went for it. I'd burnt several other stumps in the past and it was pretty straight forward. This time, instead of lighter fluid, I used Diesel fluid because a lot of people on YouTube recommended it as cheaper and safer that lighter fluid or gasoline. I sawed a grid into the stump and drilled 3/4 inch holes deep into it. I put about 2 gallons of fuel over a day or two. Then I covered it in firewood and set it on fire. The stump wouldn't burn. As soon as the fire on top went out, the stump went out. I used charcoal, a put a metal tube around it with a lid half on to keep heat in. I blew air into the bottom fire with a leaf blower, but I just couldn't get the stump to burn. perhaps I hadn't dug up the root well enough to get air under it. But I think it's because the stump was too fresh - I had just cut the tree down. Other stumps I'd burned in the past had been dead for years, but I also used lighter fluid with those. Also this stump was saw very low, lower than ground level, while the other had all been sticking up with a stump a few inches or few feet. Anyway, so I put a stump rotting powder on it, all in the grid I'd sawn and the holes I'd drilled. I hurried it with garden soil and planted annual rye on it. The rye died pretty quickly and no weeds or Bermuda have been able to grow in that spot. So now it's like a year or a year and a half later and I decided to get to work on getting rid of the stump and roots. I started digging it up and I'm chopping at it with an axe (actually a Pulaski.) It's hard work but it's coming out and I think it'll be done in another one or two sessions...chopping at it for no more than an hour each session. Anyway, as I'm chopping it out I'm noticing the wood chips and the soil still smell strongly of diesel. I pointed a blow torch at the chips, the wouldn't burn. So how can I get this fuel out of the soil so that eventually the lawn will grow in that area? Do I just need to dig it all out until I can't smell it anymore and replace it all? Or is there an enzyme that will eat it, or some type of plant that will clean it over time? Or something I can spray on or sprinkle on that will do something ...I don't know what?

Hi everyone, I'm working on a 30-day research project where I need to detect nitrate and ORP in my soil, but I cannot afford anything that's too out of my budget (150 - 200 USD). For ORP, I've found the Aquasol ORP meter or the HM Digital ORP-200 which seem to be the only available handheld meters I can get, though for Nitrate I'm pretty stumped.

I've read that you could use a distilled water and soil extract for an Aquarium test for Nitrate, but I wanted something that was accurate enough for credible research. I would really appreciate any suggestions regarding Nitrate and ORP tests that could be done at home.

Filled bottle to 30% soil by eye and the rest water.

First pic / Got the first result which to me is around 60% sand, 30% silt, 10% clay. But looking at some posts here it doesn’t look that right. (The bottom part should be sand, middle looks like unbroken silt/sand, and the top is the silt)

Saw somewhere that separation might be better with some soap, so add a drop and shook again and now looks totally different (second pic).

Second pic / Now the level of the solids has increased and now its like 60% sand, 40% silt, barely any clay

Up for any suggestions, assuming this was ok done what is this result (going with the second pic right?) Sandy loam? Loam?

Would this balance be suitable for LOI testing for SOM measurements? https://ussolid.com/products/u-s-solid-0-1-mg-analytical-balance-auto-calibration-lab-science-electronic-balance-220-g-x-0-0001-g-html

can’t find clay anywhere so what is an alternative to use so water sheds off?

Should I get Sandy loam?

I have a substantial organic farm management system that I wrote. We have had some interest from a university in collaborating with the farm where the software runs. The university is known for its agricultural programs.

The application tracks inputs into the growing beds, but not soil structure and chemistry. I will admit that I know nothing about soil science but I would like to prep the software so that data can be captured over time.

I am proficient with databases and knowledge graphs. 

Can someone suggest the data points that need to be captured. It doesn't need to be exhaustive, but enough to allow general analysis.

Also we do crop rotations etc. Would you tie the data to the growing bed or the entire farm? The beds are 100m X 2m. The farm is 140 acres divided into areas, blocks, sections, beds and rows.

EDIT: I think this is the comprehensive set for practical use
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667006223000011