Making Garden Soil from Clay...

foreign [Music] clay like this into good garden soil is always somewhat of a challenge all my productive Garden has come from clay soil like this and this is pretty solid clay and over the years I have successfully converted it into nice garden soil that now grows really well so how do you do it well there's two primary factors that come in one is that you can add Gypsum to the clay soil which will change the chemical structure and help it to break up but the primary method is to incorporate organic material into the soil in preparing this patch I have come through with the tractor and ripped it for a second time some of you may have seen the original video where I gave this a basic Rip but I came back with five tines on and ripped it this helped not only to break up the solid clay underneath but also to locate any remaining stones that were still there and there were a few it also was a little bit of a test to whether the tractor would fit into this section as I had planned it would work a lot better if I didn't have the bucket on but it does fit after ripping it I spread some gypsum around on the soil there is a lot of variants in recommendations as to what rate to use gypsum for this area which is about 100 square meters the recommendations range between 20 kilos to 200 kilos of gypsum I'm using 45 kilos which is probably mid of the more frequent recommendations and it may be that that doesn't do the job in one year and that I need to add more in subsequent years but my main goal is to get organic matter into this soil and I think that is what really makes the difference now a lot of people wouldn't like the cultivation that I'm doing here I think it's necessary to actually break the really solid clay that's underneath because it was really hard down underneath and without breaking that up I wouldn't be able to do what I'm going to do which is to grow a crop in here the only way that you could do it without cultivating like this is to bring in very large amounts of compost and organic matter such as composted wood chips and lay it over the top of the soil now I don't have that available to me certainly not in the quantities to do 100 square meters so yesterday after spreading the gypsum I watered the area because we are lacking in rain at the moment to give it a little bit of moisture and just soften the clay before coming in and rotary hoeing the area so this morning it's looking basically the way I want it to look there's still a lot of Fairly large clods here like this is still hard and large but breaking that up too fine would result in it recompacting very quickly the ideal thing would be to grow a green manure crop in it and incorporate that back into the soil before actually attempting to grow a productive crop but I need some space to actually grow some potatoes it's late December and it's time for me to get the late season crop of potatoes into the ground that I usually plant around the end of December early January and grows into autumn so I've come up with an idea where I could actually incorporate the potatoes as well as a green manure crop here at the same time so what I'm doing is I'm running rows for the potatoes that are at least a meter apart having them separate like this is going to be really good across this low rainfall time of the year so that they'll get more nutrition and more water out of the soil and not compete with each other as much I'm planting them in the same way that I normally would I'm using a meat and bone meal as a fertilizer I've got well sprouted potatoes to put in and they'll come through very very quickly it's just one thing I'm doing different and that's because I don't have sufficient of my own compost to use I'm adding a small amount of potassium to replace that and I'm covering the potatoes back using the wheel hoe so in between those rows I'm seating it with a green manure mix now the green manure mix is largely annual grains and this only needs to grow to about four inches high before being reincorporated into the soil so I've ended up with four rows of potatoes I put an experimental row of broad beans in down the bottom and I've got the green mirror in between those rows now my plan is that at the stage hopefully where the potatoes are ready for a major Hill this green manure will have reached around about this High which is this stage which it's really good to put it back into the soil so what I'll then do is come through with the rotary hoe and then use that loose material to actually Hill the potatoes how this will work remains to be seen we are going to need a little bit of moisture on here to germinate the seed the weather has changed in a couple of hours that I've been planting these potatoes we have the promise of a few days of showers over the next three or four days however I will put the sprinkler on and water this anyway because that way I can be assured that it's going to come away with good germination and get underway so that's the process that I'm using here and I'll be back in a few weeks probably when it's ready to Rotary hoe in and show you the progress and how it's working and hopefully it's going to be a lot more green by that stage [Music] [Music]

Channel: Homesteading DownUnder

Views: 78,855

Keywords:

Id: LwzHs9SMBhA

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 01 2023