So, I went out back to do yard work, and Mom had a glass jar on the patio for some reason.
Not pictured: A glass jar filled with mud.
I wanted the gallon pitcher with markings on it. I have a graduated cylinder with far more markings, but I am not sure that it holds as much as the jar. Can we see how everything separates out? I do not have any idea. Are there more than two layers? I doubt that I do not see additional layers because it is all the same stuff, but Arizona is a weird place. Choosing a [not-entirely-clean] translucent pitcher might have messed up everything.
Well, how much did the dirt expand?
[nervous laugh]
So, I got two quick shovel fulls (not forcing the shovel into the dirt, that is way too much time and effort), dropped it into the pitcher, added water until it started overflowing, broke another leg off of Mom's tomato basket, twisted it into a spiral, and used my cordless screwdriver to mix up the mud.
I could not find my shavingcrete mixer.
So, how high was the dirt before I mixed it?
On average?
It was two big lumps.
I resized the image so that it was 1,000 pixels from the two and three quart marks. The water line is 243 pixels above the middle of the 2 Qts line and the organic matter line was 163 pixels above the 3 Qts line.
2.243 quarts of mud
3.163 - 2.243 = 0.92 quarts of dirty water.
So, I should probably go back with a dish pan, shovel an approximately equivalent amount of dirt,
break it up, shovel it into the
clean and dry pitcher to the two-quart line, add two quarts of water, mix, and give some privacy.
Did I ruin everything? I think that we know enough. I tried to get approximately equal portions dirt and water. I ended up with 71% mud and 29% dirty water. Maybe I was off 42%, but dirt is not supposed to expand when it turns to mud?
Sponges expand when they absorb water! What am I missing?