Shared Grounds: Gouwplein Biodiversity Garden: Soil test time!

After a lot of back and forthing of emails we finally were able to arrange for the soil of the plot to be tested. We were curious to find out more about the lead content of the soil, its percentile of organic material, and the ph value, feeling this might help us to think about how we can further work within the site, and what plants we might like to introduce that could also help with soil rejuvenation. It could be that in a years time or so we could perform another test to see if things have shifted in the soil, or not.

We had been told previously via the Gemeente that the ground lead content was of a level at which it was not recommended to grow edible plants or vegetables, though that it was safe enough to interact with the soil, just to be sure to wash hands and be a bit sensible whilst working with it. We firstly wanted to see if it was possible for the Gemeente to request a test of the site, seeing it was property owned by the city, though we were told that it was quite expensive to be performed even for their internal uses.

After reaching out to a couple of soil testing laboratories, and being knocked back by them, generally for being too small of a business to deal with... we managed to get in contact with SGS Environmental Analytics, (www.sgs.com/analytics-nl) who also took a lot of convincing to get them to take on our request. We needed to be a company, which thankfully we were with our self-employed artist businesses, and it also involved spending over 200euros for a base report, a detailed explanatory one costing close to 1000euros which we could not justify. The process then was not something made easy to access on both bureaucratic and monetary levels, feeling like it was very much set up for bigger businesses to explore, rather than the two of us or other individuals.

We talked a lot about where we thought we should take the sample, and decided that it might make the most sense to fill a bucket with smaller trowel fulls at a few spots around the garden, then getting a bit of an 'averaged' out sample for the site. We also made sure to dig in spots where we had not put the wood mulch, and tried to dig down as far as we could go, but not more than a foot, as this was the top soil which generally we would be working with anyway.

The SGS lab is located in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam Zuid. Guillem was able to drive to the lab and bring in our sample, fill out the necessary paperwork and say goodbye to this little pot full of living mass that we wanted to know a bit more about :)

Now we will wait for a report by email of their findings...