Soil Texture Test

Qualitative Test:

When performing this test I took about a handful of soil, a little smaller than the size of a ping pong ball, and added a few drops of water to the wad of soil until it was moist. Then, using my thumb and forefinger I squeezed it into a strand that was a couple of inches. Since I was able to at least form a short ribbon we ruled out the soil being mostly sand. However, since it was shorter we came to the conclusion that we most likely had silt or loam, because if it was clay the ribbon, theoretically, would have been able to be longer. Also the feeling of the soil helped us reach the conclusion of loam or silt because it felt a little sticky but not noticeably sticky so we thought it was mostly silt with maybe a little trace of clay.

Quantitative Test:

Before Shaking

For this test we placed 70 mL of our soil into a graduated cylinder and filled it with water to the 100mL mark. The soil was originally a light dull brown but the water made it darker. After shaking the apparatus and mixing the water and soil it formed a dark brown substance. After leaving it out overnight the water again rose up above the soil leaving only one distinct layer of soil. There was about 11 cm of a medium brown color that had spots of dark color throughout and the water had become lightly tinted brown. Based on this calculation that 100% of our soil was the same we would label it as silt. We also took into account our qualitative test though which further strengthened our belief that we had silt because of its ability to form a short ribbon. The small trace of clay that we believed we had due to the ability to form a ribbon caused us to think that we had about 10% clay and not the 0% that the quantitative would've suggested. Therefore, for the clay and sand percentage we accounted for a very low 0-10%, leaning more towards the 0% side for sand, and 10% side for clay. This left about 85-90% to silt which based on our one layer seen in the test would make sense. Based solely on the quantitative test we would have silt, however; taking the qualitative test into account we thought it was more realistic that our soil fell into the silt loam category. Looking at the triangle to the right you can see that they met up at right around where the silt and silt loam categories meet (indicated by black dot), suggesting it is somewhere within that range. This however somewhat contradicts our percolation test outcome because since water took about the same time to filter through our soil as it did in sand, and drained about the same amount of water it suggests that our soil is more similar to sand than clay. Looking at this test we would have expected a greater percentage of sand in our soil than what we saw in our quantitative test. It was difficult to determine which areas were more likely to hold what soils because a lot of it varied and it was difficult to find accurate descriptions of the different areas and how they were developed since most were not necessarily well known or important places. Even our soil, which was from Cuba Marsh was hard to find because it is likely to have many types of soil because it incorporates many different types of land, with some of it being marsh and prairie, along with others. 

after shaking

After leaving out overnight