soil health clinic
The Soil Clinic is a new DIY community facility offering free and low cost soil testing for growers, community gardeners and anyone with an interest in caring for their local environment. We offer a drop in space where you can connect with others, share skills, learn together about soil health, and make use of specialist equipment like microscopes and soil chemistry tests.
For many urban food growers, soil pollution is an unknown quantity, and people may have concerns about growing food for consumption. Yet soil testing remains prohibitively expensive and the results can be hard to make sense of. We aim to provide tools for meaningful testing and learning so that you can engage more with your soil.
Our values are rooted in social justice, land justice, soil justice, food justice, racial justice, disability justice, and a desire to transform conditions which create oppression and inequity. We are brought together by a deep love for the land, soil, and the communities we are part of; we seek to nourish relationships as part of this project. We will centre Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK), and share a range of different approaches to knowing and relating to soil, attending to the ways that knowledge and power are unequally distributed between institutions and communities of soil-carers. This is not a “citizen science” project, we are “commoning” science instead, empowering ourselves to test, learn, relate, respond to and access soil and land in different ways.