A student of the soil

I have decided to become a student of soil. I bought a thick text book – SOILS: Their Properties & Management. It has 448 pages, and articles by people I know, like John Lawrie (“Truck”) and Andrew Wooldridge (“Woolly”) and people I’d like to know, like Brian Murphy. It tells me that drainage and the amount of time soil is saturated is important. Well-drained soilsjhave red tp reddish brown colours. Poorly drained soils (that remain wet for weeks or all winter) have dull yellow and grey colours. Very poorly drained soils are wet most of the time and are usually very pale grey, bluish or olive green (“gley” colours). In these cases iron has been leached from the soil. From what I have seen, we have grey coloured soils that remain wet for weeks. From this photo – taken in an erosion site down by the river, in Cemetery Paddock, you can see the colours tend to grey-ish.
We hope to improve the drainage of our soils by encouraging the growth of deep-rooted perennial pasture grasses which help to grown soil organic matter and CARBON.