With Steve Martin · Thursday 19 November
Read your sap test.
What is your crop’s sap telling you? Read a test by hand, the way Steve does, level by level. Then see how the hub will do the reading with you.
Bring
- Your latest sap test, new leaf and old: its printout for the workbook, and the spreadsheet your lab emails, if it sends one.
- The one before it, if you have it.
- Photos of the crop, and what you see in it.
- What you’ve put on lately: the last foliar and the last fertigation.
By hand
The sap test workbook
Steve’s worksheet, for onions and potatoes. Start with the stage, then work up the four levels of plant health from the bottom: the minerals, what the hormones are doing, and whether it shows in the plant. It ends with your plan and a graph to plot.
Print it blank, or fill it from a test first. It goes home with you.
- 4 Secondary metabolites
- 3 Increased lipid synthesis
- 2 Complete protein synthesis
- 1 Complete photosynthesis
On screen
The made-up tests
The tests on the big screen are made up: no grower’s figures. Two blocks, three tests each, new leaf and old, laid out as two labs send theirs. Labs prepare sap differently, so their numbers differ too.
- OnionsA block from three to six leaves and into bulbing.The onions’ tests (CSV)
- PotatoesA paddock from stolons to hooking.The potatoes’ tests (Excel)
Put either into Your sap tests in the hub, and it reads the lab’s file, pairs the new leaf with the old, and draws each mineral’s trend. Or fill the workbook from one.
Your test is yours
- Your test is read only if you say so, and shown on the screen only if you want it shown.
- Nothing is kept, unless you join and save it in your own account.
- Your workbook goes home with you. We keep no copy of your figures.
- Photos of you, or your words, only with your signed say-so.