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Small Container Sampling

This is an example of pulling samples from small sample areas with limited material to work with. Pro Tip: It's a good idea to take samples when you are re-potting container plants. You can limit the disturbance you create and access the entire root base for sampling in one swift move this way. 

Other Sampling Examples

These are several different sampling situations to help you collect proper representative samples of you soil environment. 

1/2 Acre Sampling
Girl surveys garden bed, down around the plants
1/4 Acre Sampling:
3/4 Acre Sampling
Acre Sampling

Micro Bio Tiny Sample

For small potted plants like houseplants and things under 5 Gallons, you don't want to potentially injure your plant when attempting to collect your sample. If you are sampling because the plant is sick you don't want to cause further damage to it by sampling and damaging root systems or even worse, damage any present fungal networks.

 

It takes a while for the fungal networks to establish themselves in potted plants because they are creating their own micro eco-system in the container growing 1 cell every 3 hours. Bacteria however can reproduce and double their entire population every 20 minutes! Do your best to minimally disrupt the rhizosphere so as not to damage any fungi growing there but try and collect as much material as you can. We need at least enough material to fill a sample tube.

Tiny Cores

The information provided here is intended to help better understand how to capture sample cores from small containers like flower-pot's 5 gallons and smaller. Due to their small sizes and containers often being extremely root dense, capturing a sample with our standard soil corer would cause damage to the plant and thus reverse our intentions. Here we offer better instruction so as not to cause damage if your intention is to balance the biology on a plant subject living in any container up to 5 gallons in size.  

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