If I told you to plant your pants, you’d think I’ve lost the plot, right?
Well, that is exactly what the Plant your Pants campaign, run by education charity The Country Trust are doing. Launched back in March 2024, they have been inviting everyone to take part in this discovery challenge. [1]
Participants are encouraged to get their hands dirty in their garden soil, by looking, touching, smelling and listening to it. The pants they are encouraging people to plant must be cotton and ideally preloved. A healthy soil will break down and degrade the cotton quicker than soil with low levels of microbial life. If your soil is healthy, you should be left with just the elastic in about 8 weeks’ time!
The Importance of Education About Soil
The Country Trust is an educational charity that connects disadvantaged children with the land that sustains us all through hands-on, sensory experiences of food and farming. It is really important that we pass the knowledge that we know about farming, food, the environment and climate change onto the next generation so that they can continue to find new ways to improve the world we live in.
Why Soil Matters to All of Us
Soil provides 95% of our food, so it is vital that we maintain and encourage as much biodiversity as possible, even if it is only in your window box, flowerbed or vegetable patch. Every garden, field, box, bed or patch counts!
Soil biodiversity plays a vital role in the soil ecosystem as soil organisms are responsible for nutrient cycling, regulating the dynamics of soil organic matter, soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions, allowing soils to function properly. [2] The more we plant the same crops in the same fields every year, the more nutrients are taken away from the soil, leaving soil that will be unable to grow crops/plants as efficiently and eventually won’t be able to grow anything at all.
What Makes Great Soil?
Soil should contain many components, many of which we can’t see:
- Insects
- Earthworms
- Organic matter in various stages of decomposition
- Water
- Air
- Nutrients
- Minerals
- A pH level between 5.5 and 7.5
Figure 1: Image of hands holding soil with earthworms. [3]
Great quality soil will also help to reduce flooding, as it has many aerated holes created by microorganisms, insects and earthworms to improve drainage. A field with bad soil, will keep the rainwater on the surface as there isn’t anywhere for it to go as the soil has become compact and lifeless.
How to Bring Soil Back to Life
What can help to bring soil back to life:
- Regular crop rotation
- Adding organic matter such as compost, rotting fruit and vegetables etc which you can collect at home (Banana peels, vegetable peelings, gone off fruit and veg etc)
- Regularly aerating the soil, moving it around, digging it up and putting it back gently, don’t compact it down.
- Adding other materials such as sand, silt and clay, these will settle into different layers as the soil and biodiversity improves.
- Decomposing plants
- Natural fertilisers such as;
- Used coffee grounds, (containing nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium)
- Grass clippings (they contain great sources of nitrogen and potassium)
- Unflavoured Gelatin (a nitrogen-rich fertiliser – MUST be unflavoured and mixed with water, added to your soil once a month)
What Planting Pants Can Tell You About Your Soil
Planting your cotton pants is a great indicator of how your soil is doing. If after 8 weeks, your pants are still intact, then you might want to think about adding some nutrients back into your soil to help bring back some biodiversity and improve the quality of the soil, which will in turn, improve the quality of what it grows for you.
If you’d like to join the Plant your Pants campaign to check the quality of your soil, click here for more details.
About Pager Power
Pager Power undertakes technical assessments for developers of renewable energy projects and tall buildings worldwide. For more information about what we do, please get in touch.
References
[1] https://www.theeconews.co.uk/plant-your-pants-this-spring-to-discover-the-life-within-your-soil/
[3] Image of hands holding soil with earthworms. Image accessed 08/01/2025. Photo credit: Sippakorn Yamkasikorn. https://www.pexels.com/photo/earthworms-on-a-persons-hand-3696170/
