Soil Samples for Dummies

soil sample collection

In keeping with the theme, established yesterday, of taking a few days off from "picking on" one-time eHow.com contributions; we've headed elsewhere again today. Truth be told, we don't visit EzineArticles.com all that often, mostly because it's so jammed with rubbish... but every once in a while you have to take one for the team. That's the main reason that we sent some poor staffer to the site, and that's why he returned a few minutes later with "Why Soil Samples Are Important," as envisioned by Kum Martin.

Martin must have had a boatload of time on his (her?) hands back in the first decade of the century, when he pumped out more than 2600 articles at Ezine alone (heaven only knows how many he visited on other, equally undemanding sites). We're stuck with this one, though. As always, when presumably dealing with a non-English speaker, we will not harp (much) on Kum's grammar.

We will, however, rag on Martin for never actually saying "why," as he promised in his title. We can think of a lot of reasons, among them sampling soil for contaminants, to determine its stability for the foundation of a building, to learn its composition, and determine the levels of micro- and macro-nutrients. Based on what little Martin wrote (250 words), we suspect he was more interested in soil from the viewpoint of a landscaper. Still, what he said didn't help much; including padding like,

"Specific tools are used to collect the samples."

Unfortunately, Martin says nothing about the "specific tools": shovels? trowels? coring tools?  And then there is such useless prattle as,

"If the soil quality is tested, then we can know how the crop will grow."

Well, no, we won't. What we will know is whether the soil has the right texture and chemistry for the crop and what fertilizers, if any, might be required. Besides, instead of discussing soil samples from an agronomist's point of view, Kum went on to prattle about lawns and shrubs: not what we'd consider "crops." Then there is out-and-out rubbish like,

"While collecting samples of the soil, make sure you use clean equipment and also neat pouches that can be sealed and labeled."

We like that "neat pouches" advice...

Apparently, Martin found advice somewhere similar to this article written by the University of Georgia Extension and attempted to perform a copy-reword-paste. Unfortunately, our Dumbass of the Day wasn't familiar enough with the topic to make sense... hence his award.

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