Smart Choice Stainless Steel Soil Thermometer

The fall seeding window is defined by soil temperature, not by the calendar and not by the air temperature on your phone. Cool-season seed germinates on what the soil is doing at seed depth, and the soil lags the air by days — which is exactly why people either seed too early into ground that is still summer-hot or miss the window waiting for it to feel like fall. This is the instrument that settles it. Push the 127 mm stainless stem into the ground, leave it a couple of minutes to equilibrate, and read the dial in place. Take the reading in the morning, in an area representative of what you are seeding rather than a hot strip along the driveway, and take it on several consecutive days — one reading is a moment, a trend is a window. The 1.5-inch dial is glass-covered and the stem and body components are stainless steel, and it is listed for garden soil, ground, and compost heaps indoors or out, so it keeps working on the compost pile after the seeding is done. The dial is marked in Fahrenheit only with no Celsius scale listed, it has no min/max memory or logging so you have to be standing there to read it, and the 5-inch stem sets the deepest reading you can take.