Put It to the Test: Improving Garden Fertility with Soil Analysis, Soil Regions, and Microclimates

Assessing the soil can save gardeners time, labor, and money, not to mention the issues that can arise from under- and overfertilization and the disappointment of a failed crop. You can prevent that by getting to know your garden through soil testing and mapping out its regions and microclimates. The presentation will start by showing you the fundamentals of sample collecting so you can get the most accurate results. It will then teach you how to interpret those results and use them to create a planting and fertilizing plan that is tailored to the space, to maximize yield with minimal input.

Presenter: Mykl Nelson is an instructor at Oregon State University. He built his first greenhouse in 2012, in Colorado, with the help of his roommate from college. The thrill of picking lettuce and herbs directly from his backyard and putting them into his bowl for salads led him to move to Oregon the next year to get more deeply involved in agriculture. Since then, he has worked on three organic urban farms, earned another undergraduate degree as well as a graduate degree, obtained a landscaping license, and developed and taught two undergraduate courses in urban agriculture.