Community Garden Lab

In lab this week our class a community garden behind Centenary Methodist Church. This specific garden was built by a company called Macon Roots. (Macon Roots) This is a company that was started by a man named Mark Vanderhoek. This company has set up community gardens in urban areas all over Macon. These gardens help people to get more involved with growing their own food. These gardens face a lot of challenges when getting started. When starting these gardens the planters and planners have to deal with contaminated soil and come up with ways to either clean up the soil or use raised boxes to get around the contaminates. These contaminants can include things like lead from cars and old houses. In our lab we used several different tools to examine the soil in the area. We used a split spoon corer and dug a hole to look at the different soil layers. We also used sieves and a dichotomous key to determine what type of soil was in the area.

Sieve

Soil Types Dichotomous Key