My coworker and I spent the day in the 40^o wind, mist and drizzle sampling soils today. It's a job we'd have preferred to have completed a couple of weeks ago, but there's just not enough time to fit everything in. Today we used a combination of this mechanized, hydraulic soil probe gizmo and a manual bucket auger to make sampling these plots two feet deep a one-day job. We punched a total of 700 holes and filled up almost 200 ziplock bags in about 6 hours. I went back and forth putting my raincoat on because I was getting wet and taking it off because I was getting overheated. Tomorrow we'll be right back in the same plots to sample soil again but in a different, shallower, easier way for altogether different measurements. The temperature is supposed to be 33^o maximum. Yeeha. We'll be breaking through a surface frost tomorrow that we didn't have to deal with today. Thank goodness for Carhartt overalls.

I will be crossing no creeks.

Technorati tag(s): science, agriculture