Improve Heavy Clay Soil

how do you fix clay soil that's the topic of today's video i see comments on social media all the time i have clay soil i can hardly dig in this stuff how do i fix it i've broken the video up into three parts in the first part we're going to look at some myths about clay soil one of the things i've noticed is that many people rush out and try and do things when they don't even have a problem the other issue we have is that people do the wrong thing so you have to understand those myths before you go out and do something in the second part i'll help you figure out whether you actually have clay soil a lot of people who think they have clay soil don't actually have a problem and there's nothing to fix if you're in that boat i'm going to save you a lot of time and money the third section is all about fixing clay soil now that you know you have it how do you fix it and make it better before we talk about clay let me just mention this plant here it's pseudofumeria used to be called coridalus which i like a lot better it comes in this creamy white color and also a really bright yellow this is one of my absolute favorite perennials it flowers from early spring right up to late fall this will still have flowers on it in october seeds around a little bit so you might have to weed out the seedlings from around it but that seed doesn't travel very far all the seedlings will be right here easy to grow you never have to weed it hardy in zone five i just love this plant back to the clay story the first thing i'd like to do is discuss some myths and these are really important because a lot of the advice you'll get online is wrong and you'll go off and do all kinds of work and buy products and do things to your garden and you may be making that situation worse you may have clay but you may not have a clay problem so the first myth is i have clay it's terrible soil that's actually not true clay is actually pretty good in fact if i had a choice between clay and sand i'm going to pick clay every time clay holds water better than sand it holds nutrients better and with a bit of time and some care clay soil can be made into great gardening soil on the other hand sand doesn't hold water plants are always dry it holds no nutrients you have to fertilize like crazy and it's really hard to take sand and turn it into a great soil so be glad you have clay it's the better option myth number two i see comments like this online when it gets dry my soil cracks like crazy that must mean i have terrible clay soil what do i do about it well i have some news for you cracking does not indicate you have a clay problem in fact soil with as little as five percent clay can crack when it dries now if you see a lot of cracking on your soil you may actually have a lot of clay but it doesn't mean you have a clay problem you may have a completely different problem ignore the cracking it does not mean you have a clay problem the third myth i'd like to talk about is gypsum one of the first pieces of advice everybody will give you if you have clay soil add gypsum gypsum is a clay buster it breaks up clay gypsum will take hard clay soil and then turn it into soil that you can dig very easily well that may be the case but most of the time that's incorrect now if you have sodic soil and this is soil with a lot of sodium in it gypsum actually will help gypsum will take the sodium ions and knock it out of the clay and replace it with calcium and now you have a much more stable clay soil so who has sodic soil well if you live near the ocean and you get a lot of salt coming in with the breeze you might have sodic soil if you're living in an area that was originally agricultural and it was watered with sea salt it could be sodic as well the other place we find a lot of sodic soil is in desert areas dry areas and what happens there is that there isn't enough rain to wash the salts into the soil so what happens is water moves up to the surface of the soil the water evaporates leaving behind the salt and this happens continuously and so you have this salt layer on your soil and that's sodic soil now how do you know if you have sodic soil get it tested if you get a sars test sar that will tell you whether you have sonic soil if you do add gypsum that will help if you don't have sodic soil and most of you don't don't use gypsum it can actually make things worse now how do you know if you have clay soil and and what is clay soil well most people refer to soil as clay soil when they have a large amount of clay in it remember soil has sand silt and clay and when clay is the majority component in that soil we call it clay soil so how do you know how much clay you have well there are some really simple tests you can do yourself at home the first one is a simple task to measure the texture texture is how much sand silt and clay do you have you simply take some soil put it in some water shake it up let it sit for a while and take measurements every so often now i've made a video that gives you complete details of that and i'll put a link to it at the end of this one it's a simple test you'll know exactly how much clay you have and that will tell you if you have a real clay problem you can also do a ribbon test this is where you take some soil and you wet it a little bit and then you play with it in your hand to see if you can form a ribbon clay soil lets you make long ribbons sandy soil doesn't that's a very crude way to measure how much clay you have and it does take a bit of practice but it's a fun thing to do and i have a video to show you how to do that too the third option is to send your sample to a lab and they'll tell you how much clay you have so now you know that you really do have a lot of clay in your soil what do you do about it one of the things a lot of people do to clean up their clay soil is to go out and buy more soil and they put it on top of their clay soil or they mix it into that soil that really makes no sense at all you already have enough soil you don't need more soil so don't do that in fact i don't know why people keep going out and buying bags of soil and adding it to their garden every year for some reason the label on those bags is too attractive to ignore it says black soil and don't we all want black soil so we go and buy it and bring it home that simply doesn't work you have soil already don't buy more the second thing a lot of people recommend is to add sand to clay now this is very controversial you have two camps you have the group of people that say don't do this if you add sand to clay you create concrete well that's nonsense because you don't have any cement in there without cement you won't have concrete what they're really trying to say is that if you take clay soil and add sand to it it will become harder the tilth will be worse it'll be harder to dig and they come up with a number of different explanations of why this happened and i've been hearing these stories for over 15 years i've also heard there was a study that actually looked at this and i've asked for this scientific study for at least 15 years no one has ever been able to produce it i really don't think it exists then you have the other camp of people who say add sand to clay at work in the eastern u.s it's quite a common practice in the western u.s it's not if you go to england it's a very common practice and some of the top english gardeners even advise you to add sand to clay now i've had three gardens with clay soil and i've added sand in each case and in each case the soil became easier to dig now i don't have any science to tell you which way you should go i just have my experience and it says adding sand to clay does not make it harder and the arguments that some people use against this method don't make a lot of sense they're not really understanding what happened when i dig up a clay garden i get these clods of clay and when i add sand in there it coats these clods very similar to a donut that gets coated in sugar these clods now tend to stay separate they don't go back together and that's what makes the clay easier to dig in fact in my garden here it's been 15 years since i added the sand in some parts of my garden and when i'm digging i still find sand coating pieces of clay i also find these veins in the soil that are mostly sand and that makes it easy for plant roots to grow through all i can tell you is it's worked for me and all of my three guard the one thing you have to understand is that adding sand to clay may make it a little easier to dig but it doesn't really improve the soil we haven't changed the real structure of the soil so we haven't improved it very much well how do you improve that structure you need organic matter and here i'm talking about solid organic matter compost manure dead plant material when you add organic matter to soil several things happen one is that you start feeding the microbe they start digesting this organic matter and as the microbes live and move around the soil they actually improve the soil that's really the secret to good soil there are two scenarios to consider the first one is a new bed you're starting from scratch what do you do well the first thing you want to do is kill the vegetation that's there okay get rid of that grass before you do anything if you dig that grass in some of it will survive and you'll hate yourself for it so get rid of that material the next thing you want to do is add a good five to six inches of compost or manure or something organic whatever you can get your hands on and then dig that in either by hand or with a rototiller now i'm not a big believer in rototellers but if this is a new garden doing it once is okay the reason is that the rototiller does damage soil structure but you don't have any soil structure because you haven't got a garden so doing it once is okay after that in all future years treat it the way you would a bed that already exists and that's case number two so now we have a bed that exists it may have plants in it it may have trees in it it may be a vegetable garden it doesn't really matter from here on in you don't dig in it you simply mulch every year with something organic compost manure wood chips whatever you can get your hands on you mulch slowly over time that mulch decomposes gets taken into the soil by the soil animals and the microbes and that improves your soil long term that's how you fix clay soil it's really that simple now there's a bunch of products on the market humic acid is claimed to fix clay it doesn't when i'm talking about organic material here i want something solid i don't want to use fishing mold i don't want to use charcoal i don't want to use all these other gimmicky things that they're selling now for clay you want the good stuff compost manure vermicompost mushroom compost any of those things will work soil is critical to the growth of your plant and every gardener should learn more about the soil and that's why i wrote my book soil science for gardener consider getting a copy for yourself and learn more about your soil and how to grow better plants thanks for watching you

Channel: Garden Fundamentals

Views: 109,152

Keywords: clay soil, heavy clay soil, improving clay, amending clay, gypsum, organic matter, better garden soil

Id: xkBvtmrtdVw

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021