It’s for that reason that soil observation is the easiest skill to master in agriculture. It is a gentle activity that teaches you to see and slow your vision before you make critical choices on the farm about sowing, irrigation, mulching, planting, and so on. To start, focus on four things when you are looking at a field: color, texture, moisture, surface. Look for the dark or pale color of the soil which will indicate either high organic matter content or recent wetting; or dryness and crusting, or compaction. Rub a sample of the soil in your fingers: see if the soil crumbles, meaning it is not compacted; and whether the soil is sticky, which usually means it is heavy. Soil observation is not a guessing activity; practice it, and you will see more of the soil and begin to notice details.
To build your skills, start with one patch, and look at it every day for a week. Look at the top layer before touching it. Stand and watch, or kneel, but be sure to be in the same spot. Now take a handful of soil and scrape just below the surface layer. Ask yourself, is it different from the surface layer? Is it darker, cooler, wetter? Here’s another exercise: describe the soil to yourself out loud. For instance, the surface is dusty. The lower layers are cool and wet. The lower soil crumbles easily when you squeeze it in your hand. It’s fine if what you’re saying is a bit clunky at first, you just need to be precise: if you just think the soil is fine, it will not be that useful for your observations. Next, do something simple. Lightly water the soil on one patch. Watch the changes in the patch over time in a few hours the next day. Watch the changes over time in the morning the next morning. The more you can watch the same patch in different states, the more you will learn from the soil, rather than just reading about soil types.
Finally, beginners often look only at the surface when judging whether to add irrigation. They see it is dry on top, so they add a ton of water. If they had been looking more closely, they would notice that the lower part of the soil was still cool and damp to the touch. This means their watering has been shallow, and so they will have weak or stunted seedlings. Check the soil a finger or two below the surface to check moisture before irrigating again. Another common error is packing down the soil too hard when examining it. When you squeeze a soil sample aggressively, it can appear much more dense than it truly is. To get a more accurate sense, try loosening up a small amount in your hand. After many iterations of this practice, the soil’s composition will be clearer to touch. There will be a distinction between dry, fluffy soil, soil that is well-draining and moist, and soil that is tight and heavy.
Sometimes, the observation phase becomes muddy. If this happens, don’t push harder; try narrowing the scope of your observation. If determining texture is difficult, observe only texture for three or four days. Try to find dry soil somewhere else and compare the texture. Do the same for moisture, and try observing a particular bed three times a day. Note the difference between how fast moisture leaves the surface and how fast moisture leaves the subsoil. You don’t have to have the right answer on the first try. Often, the first step in a correct observation is spotting your incorrect one. It is a mistake you want to make because you need to know what you’re wrong about in the first place. If you discover the surface is dry, but the subsoil isn’t, consider this a discovery, not a mistake.
You can build a sense of confidence about a particular bed with as little as 15 minutes of work. Spend the first five minutes not touching anything and trying to get a sense of the physical appearance of the bed. Look at it as a whole and identify cracks in the soil, clumped soil, plant matter, and shifts in color. Use the next five minutes to run your hand over the bed and the soil just beneath it and try to determine how much it holds together and the consistency of the clumps and cracks. For the remaining five minutes, identify what was different and what action (if any) should be taken. Maybe it is time for the bed to get watered, maybe you should leave it alone, or maybe you should come back and observe again in the evening. Because you’re only committing 15 minutes, you are much more likely to stick with it. Consistency is the key here.
As you get comfortable doing this, the soil will cease being the backdrop for the growing process and will instead be the starting point for the growing process. This change in focus and awareness is extremely important to a beginner gardener. Good agricultural decisions are rarely the result of hasty action; they are the result of careful observation. If a bed seems to have water draining through it too fast, that’s something to note, just like if a bed seems to seal up or if the surface remains much cooler than normal after it rains. You get better and more accurate at making the decisions because you’re paying much closer attention.