so we're going to talk about soil texture and we're going to do a simple hand test to determine soil texture if you recall from the other videos there's three main particle sizes of soil that dictate to that texture sand which is really large silt which is pretty small and Clay which is really really tiny and so depending on the ratio of those three particle sizes in a soil sample it's going to have different physical traits one of the main ones is going to be how much it holds onto water so if you recall from the other videos sand doesn't hold water very well loam which is in the middle of clay and sand holds it really well and it's available to plant clay holds a lot of water but it holds onto it a little too well to where it's not that available to plants and so your soil texture is very important and we're going to show you some simple tests you can do at home in your garden to determine your soil texture so we'll start here with sand so I'm going to put a soil a soil assemble in my hand something like that too much and I'm going to feel it get a judge for what I think the soil might be and then what I'm going to do is add a little water if you have a spray bottle that works a little bit better but my spray bottle just broke so I'm just going to pour water and you've got you got to practice a little bit determining how much water you need to take a little practice figure that out but what you can notice right away with this soil sample is if I pour water on it tends to go right through it it's not holding on to it very well and so there I have too much water hmm and so now I want to try and make a ball if you notice I can't roll it as soon as I try and roll it it smashes so it falls apart pretty pretty easily it doesn't quite make a ball so if it can't make a ball then we're going to call it sand just just pure sand and I know the sample is pure sand because I collected this in the desert so I'm pretty confident this is sand okay so let's look let's look at another sample so this soil sample is from my garden in the back where we grow tomatoes and so we're going to look at the soil composition for my garden soil so again I'm going to take a soil sample pour some water try and saturate the soil completely right away I can tell this is pretty coarse so it's going to have a lot of sand in it we're going to try and make a ball got a little bit too much water in it squeeze some of the water out I can tell I can make a ball with it so that tells me this isn't sand so the next test then is to determine if I can make a rivet so what I'm going to do is I'm take the ball put it between my index finger and my thumb I'm going to try and push a ribbon out over the Arc of my hand so push a ribbon out like this and I suspect this one either won't make a ribbon or it'll make a really short ribbon like a better sample here again [Music] so I'm going to start to push the ribbon out and you can see it falls as soon as it breaks that breaks the the arc on my hand there so if you consider that a ribbon at all it'll be definitely less than two and a half centimeters or it's no ribbon and so that either puts it at what we call a loamy sand which would mean no Ribbon or a sandy loam meaning it's a ribbon less than two and a half centimeters and I I already talked about this but from the texture of it it is very very coarse which puts it as sandy loam so it's somewhere between a loamy sand and a Sandy low I know the soil names are a little bit funny but that's how we would classify this one so it's primarily sand dominated but it has some other stuff in there that allows it to form a ball and maybe a tiny ribbon okay next we're going to take this third sample I suspect this third sample has a lot of clay in it but I haven't tested it yet so pour out more sample in there my hand get a little bit of water try and mix it up a little bit more soil sample that's the wrong one more of that one put that further away from me so I'll do that again mix it up and right away I can feel this one is way stickier like it's sticking to my hands really badly it's actually hard to mix up because it's so sticky and that's one of the attributes of a clay if you ever have you ever worked a clay in art class you know it gets really messy it's very very sticky so I got to try and work work the soil a little bit I think I have it a little bit too wet I'm going to add a little bit more it just takes a little bit of practice trying to judge that easily forms a ball no problem at all but look at my hands look how much dirtier my hands are sticking to my hands a lot more that's definitely a sign of a clay so now I'm going to try and make a ribbon so I'm going to try and push it out it's a little bit too sticky so I might have a little bit trouble I might have to try it again see how it's sticking to my hand too much okay just add a little bit of water to try and make it a little bit less sticky okay there's the same reason why people work with Clay keep their hands wet you can see it's making a pretty long ribbon there in fact it's going to use up my whole sample it's going down the whole length of my hand so you can see the length of that ribbon already it still hasn't broken they're broke so when it broke it was way over five centimeters if it's over five centimeters then we're going to call it a clay and I'll I'll um attach the instructions or the dichotomous key I'm using in my head right now is how I'm deciding that but if it's over five centimeters it's a clay if it's between two and a half and five it's a clay loam if it's less than two and a half it's a loam like our other sample might have been so this is a clay so the next part is to determine if it's smooth if it's Sandy or it's somewhere in between so I'm just going to take a small sample like that I'm going to put up my hand like I did on the last sample and I just want to feel the texture of it so it doesn't feel coarse in my hand does it feel silky what's it feel like and I think it feels very Sandy it's very coarse so in that case this would be a Sandy clay so we had sand in this in our original sample my garden sample was a sandy loam to a loamy sand and in this one we have a Sandy clay so those are three different types of soil textures based on the composition of those three particle sizes so definitely try this at your home and play around with the soil for a little bit it might take a long time to practice that and we're going to do this more in class but let me know if you have any questions