Overview
The Lavender Field's first objective, Know the ground, has two steps: Find your site and Record a soil test. On a farm without a location, Find your site opens the ZIP setup. The fuller Analyze the real farm site window offers three choices.
The choices
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Analyze address & soil | Matches a complete U.S. street address with the U.S. Census Geocoder, then loads mapped soil from USDA NRCS Soil Data Access and a live temperature reading. |
| Use device coordinates | Asks your browser for your position and loads mapped soil and a live reading for that point. |
| 🧭 Pick for me | Chooses a random hardiness zone and soil profile for a game-only start, without sending an address or coordinates anywhere. |
Pick for me profiles
| Soil | Starting pH | Starting drainage |
|---|---|---|
| Sand | about 6.5 | about 90% |
| Sandy loam | about 6.9 | about 82% |
| Loam | about 7.1 | about 70% |
| Clay | about 7.4 | about 45% |
What gets set
- Mapped soil sets your farm's texture, pH and drainage, and builds the 30 starting map tiles from it with small tile-to-tile differences.
- If the address or device lookup fails, your selected USDA zone profile is applied automatically.
- Live temperature readings are only shown when actually observed; they never change your farm's weather.
Soil texture from the map
Clay content of 35% or more counts as clay; otherwise 65% sand or more is sand, 45% or more is sandy loam, and the rest is loam. Drainage classes map to drainage scores: well drained or better 90%, moderately well drained 75%, somewhat poorly drained 55%, worse 35%.
See also
Written from the game itself. Spot something out of date? and our farm team will check it.
