Case study: Plant Your Pants
Photo acknowledgement: The Country Trust
- General public
- Outdoor
- Campaign / event, Citizen science, Experiment, Hands-on activity
- United Kingdom
Plant Your Pants
‘Plant Your Pants’ is an experiment and educational activity designed to be carried out by any individual or group and aimed at increasing awareness about soil and its role in supporting life on earth. It invites people to bury a pair of cotton pants, leave them for eight weeks and then dig them up to see what has happened to them. This provides a simple and engaging test for determining how healthy the soil they were buried in is – the more disintegrated the pants, the better the soil health.
The initiative is run by the Country Trust, a UK national educational charity whose mission is to connect people to the land that sustains us. It reported 23,000 people from across the UK as having taken part in the initiative in its first year.
Objective
The principal objective of the ‘Plant Your Pants’ initiative is to develop a curiosity about soils and soil health. Observing how and to what extent the cotton degrades during the eight-week period that it is buried provides the basis and enthusiasm for further learning about soil properties and functions, and how they can be improved.
Approach
People bury cotton underpants in the soil and dig them up again after eight weeks to discover how they have degraded by the microbial activity in the soil, demonstrating soil biodiversity in action. The healthier the soil, the faster the cotton will degrade. The experiment is suitable for all ages and can be carried out in any patch of soil, whether a garden, a plant pot, a field, school playground or football field.
This creative and fun approach aims to make soil health both engaging and accessible to everyone. It is particularly well suited to intergenerational learning within families. There is also a collaborative aspect to it, where participants are able to share their findings online thanks to an interactive soil map that helps build a picture of soil health across the country and can ask a scientist or farmer any soil-related questions they can think of.