 I am Lucy Edwards with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Today we're going to go over the fact you're going to have high organic material in your raised bed. So this will not be a routine soil test. This will be run as what they consider a saturated paste test to analyze that high organic matter. It will still give you results for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium. And then if you want additional micronutrients, it can also tell you that as well. So a few things that you will need when you take a soil sample. First, you'll need a container. So this is just an old pot lying around. You can use anything, just something, to hold the soil. If you have a soil probe, you can use a soil probe. But most of us probably have a handy trowel lying around. And so that's what we'll use today. Within this raised bed, I'm going to take a couple of different sub-samples, mix them together in my bucket, and then lastly, I will combine them in a Ziploc bag because this is about as much soil as you need. And then we'll place the soil in our box. We'll form with each sample. Now each form, you can do up to five samples. So you don't necessarily need a form for each box. You could use five different soil boxes to go with one form. Some people will ask, well, do I need a separate soil sample for each raised bed? My response to that would be if you can tell a major difference in your growing conditions, I'd probably do two separate samples. Now if they're both having similar yields, then I would only take one sample. And what I would probably do is when I'm taking my sub-samples, I would take half from this bed and half from that bed. So we're going to begin sampling this bed samples about four inches deep. And we're going to take them from different parts of this bed, going to mix together. That way it's a blended representation of our bed. We're going to take our Ziploc bag. We're going to fill it most of the way up. This is about halfway, and that's OK. The reason why we use a bag before putting it inside the box is simply because this soil is moist and the box is cardboard. And over time, that moist soil will break down the cardboard box. And if you mail this, when it gets to the soil lab, this box will be all falling apart. So therefore, I like to put it in a Ziploc bag. As you can see, it fits nicely in the box. We're going to close the box according to the directions. It does have a little sticky seal here, so it closes. You don't need any tape or anything. And that is our box. The next step would be filling out the name of the sender. So that would be your name. The mailing address, the location, and then field name. So if you have your raised beds labeled, or if you have them like tomato bed versus pepper bed, you would put the name of that raised bed where it says field name, and then crop to be grown. So that may be pepper, tomato, squash, zucchini. You could do generic vegetables, and it will come back making recommendations for all of your vegetables. Then last, what we wrote on the box. We're going to then write on the form, so that way it correlates this box name. So if we named it box number one, acres you would put down square footage because obviously this is not an acre. And then the crops to be grown again could be tomato, vegetable, tomatoes, or vegetables, depending on what you've put on your box. And that is how you take a basic soil sample for a raised bed garden.