May – October
Hands-on compost building
Build a thermophilic pile from scratch, as a group. Measuring the inputs, layering the quarter-rounds, getting it wet enough. You leave knowing how to do it in your own yard.
Sprout members and up
Workshops & events
Learn it with your
hands in it.
Soil is difficult to learn from a screen. Everything below happens outdoors, in a real pile or over a real microscope, with other people who are trying to work out the same things you are.
Through the season
Turn & Learn worm parties
A pile gets turned, and everyone gets to see what is happening inside it at that stage — heat, structure, and who has moved in since last time.
Sprout members and up
Growing season
Brix testing
Measure the sugar content of leaves with a refractometer and find out what it says about plant health, insect pressure, and whether your food is actually nutrient dense.
Sprout members and up
Year round
Sourcing materials
Where the inputs actually come from — coffee chaff from a local roaster, cardboard, leaf fall, manure. What to accept, what to refuse, and how to ask.
Sprout members and up
Advanced
Soil Biology 101
The organisms themselves: who does what, how the food web actually cycles nutrients, and how to read a biological report without needing anyone to translate it.
Root members and up
Advanced
Microscopy experiences
Your own sample, your own hands on the scope. Learning to recognise what you are looking at is the point where soil stops being abstract.
Root members and up
How to hear about dates
Members get first call.
Workshops are small by necessity — you cannot teach twenty people to turn one pile. Dates go out through the newsletter and to members before anywhere else, and members get priority registration and member pricing when they attend.
Out in the community
Find us around town.
We show up at community gatherings, markets, and local events around Olympia with a microscope and whatever is currently living in a sample. If you would like Soil Detective at your school, garden club, farm, or neighbourhood event, get in touch.
Invite us to an eventCome and look at your own soil.
Workshops fill up, but a soil check is available any week. Call (360) 259-3637 or send a sample and we will show you what is in it.