Plant Your Pants this spring to discover the life within your soil
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People across the UK are being invited to plant a pair of cotton pants this spring and then dig them up two months later to see for themselves the life within the soil. The Plant Your Pants campaign, run by education charity The Country Trust, launches on the first day of spring (20 March 2024) and invites everyone to take part in a journey of soil discovery to find out what really is going on down there. Along the way, partici-pants will be encouraged to look, touch,
listen to and smell their soil. Healthy soil will break down or degrade cotton more quickly than soil with low levels of microbial life. If you’re left with just the elastic, it’s a good sign that your soil is active and healthy. The Country Trust is an education charity that connects disadvantaged children with the land that sustains us all through hands-on, sensory experiences of food and farming. Last year 23,000 children visited working farms with The Country Trust to learn at first-hand about how food is grown and the vital importance of soil to all our lives. The charity’s national Plant Your
Pants campaign is wonderfully simple - just plant a pair of (ideally pre-loved) cotton pants in soil on or around the first day of spring in March, and then dig them up eight weeks later to see what has happened to them. Jill Attenborough, CEO of the Country Trust, said: “We all depend on soil for our existence but as Leonardo Da Vinci said 500 years ago, ‘We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot’. The response to Plant Your Pants last year exceeded all our expectations, and we can’t wait to get the nation planting pants again. “It’s our mission as a charity to