Get to your soil, know what to do with it

Soil is not what you think it is. It is not the brown stuff the tree sits in. It is a living, arguing, trading, self-organising community that shreds rock, pre-digests carbon and hands the plant what its roots could never reach alone. Everything we call fertility is a by-product of that argument going well. Everything we call a struggling plant is a by-product of it going badly.

You were probably sold a story that soil is chemistry, with a bit of biology in it — and that you feed a plant the way you feed a boiler. It was a useful lie for a century and it is now the reason our parks fail in year three, our farms and food systems are failing, and our best trees arrive at the planting pit already halfway to dead. The story was never true. Soil is a relationship, and every relationship has a state of function you can read.

This workshop teaches you to read it.

The Soil Function Ladder is the diagnostic I’ve built over the last decade, now taught to nurseries, municipalities and landscape teams from Skåne to Riga. Four rungs, from collapsed to regenerative. Once you can see the rung a soil is standing on, you stop guessing. You know what it needs, what it doesn’t, and — the part nobody teaches — what it is about to do next.

You leave with a way of seeing. You leave with a soil in your hands you read yourself. You leave with a checklist that survives contact with a real site on Monday morning.

Bring a park, a pit, a field, a problem. We’ll read it together.

Half-day. Nurseries, park departments, contractors, arborists, growers, specifiers. No prior soil science required — the ladder is a way of seeing before it is a vocabulary.

The mission

We share what we know, freely and without gatekeeping. Soil science has spent too long from the practitioners who need it most, inside disciplines that don’t talk translate into change, and in the hands of people who monetise the confusion. We are on a mission to advance knowledge, understanding and curiosity about the matrix that makes our lives possible — the living soil under every field, every pit, every forest floor.

Our workshops are the frame. The soil is the content. What you take home is a way of seeing that changes how you plant, specify, farm and design for the rest of your working life.

The vision

A generation of practitioners — farmers, arborists, park chiefs, growers, designers — who read soil the way a doctor reads a patient. Landscapes that regenerate themselves because the people managing them know what function looks like, and what it doesn’t. Living soil treated as infrastructure — the matrix beneath every city, every field, every forest — funded, specified and defended accordingly.

We are working toward a world where the ground under our feet is understood. Where fertility is built, not bought. Where the question is no longer what do we add to the soil but what is the soil already doing, and how do we work with it.

That is the world we are building. One workshop, one pit, one field at a time.

What you'll learn

What the soil is about to do next. How to spot a soil that is about to lose function — the year-three failure, the compacted pit, the tired field — and how to spot one that is recovering. Reading the direction, not just the state.

Working with function, not against it. How specification, planting, amendment and management change once you can see the rung. What to add, what to stop adding, what to plant, and — most often — what to leave alone.

Your site, on Monday morning. A short exercise using a soil, a pit or a problem you bring with you. You leave with a written reading and a next-step checklist for that specific site.

By the end you can walk onto a site, read the soil in front of you, name the rung it is on, and explain to a colleague what it needs.

The workshop is built around one question: what state of function is this soil in, and what does that tell me to do next? Everything in the half-day serves that question.

Reading soil as a living system. How to see the pit, the field, the nursery block as a working stomach rather than a passive medium. What is happening between the roots, the microbes and the minerals — and why the same soil recipe performs differently on two neighbouring sites.

The four rungs of the Soil Function Ladder. Collapsed, chemical, biological, regenerative. What each rung looks like in the hand, what it costs the plant, and what it takes to move up one step. This is the diagnostic frame the rest of the day hangs on.

Field indicators anyone can read. Colour, structure, smell, root behaviour, water response. Simple observations that tell you which rung you’re standing on before any lab result arrives. You’ll do this on a real soil in the room.

Signature Workshop

Book a workshop

Delivered in English. Booking currently open for the autumn 2026 and spring 2027.

59degrees Soil Architects

Soil architecture for biological function.

hej@59degrees.com

Org No. 559020 1488