collecting soil samples

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Today I spent four hours out in the cold digging up dirt. (yay!) Cliff had mapped out his vineyard and divided it up into 19 paralellogram-type sections of roughly equal area (about 3,400ft²). We then went out into the field armed with a wheelbarrow, a large sieve (of I’m guessing .5cm by .5cm grid in a wooden frame), two sediment corers with bent spatulas, three buckets, plastic bags and a sharpee. We collected soil samples from within each area by taking sediment cores of one-inch diameter and about 5-6 inches deep. We took six cores per row for seven rows in each section alternating taking cores from the middle and the top of the row zigzagging across each row and collecting them all in a bucket. We each started from opposite ends and met at the wheelbarrow in the middle. Then we pushed our samples through the sieve on top of the wheelbarrow until we were left with a mixture of sifted soil that represented the entire section, which we collected in quart-sized plastic bags and labelled 1-19 (one bag per section). We got through approximately two thirds of the vineyard before 5pm. It was thoroughly exhausting work. We both had sore backs and sore hands from working out in the field. (We must have taken about 500 cores!) I have a new respect for manual labourers and farmer people.