Gardening in clay soil ... HELP!

[willow_girl]

My new place in western PA has clay soil. Clay ... and rocks!

After 20 years of gardening in Michigan's sandy loams, I'm at a loss. What can I grow in this sticky stuff? Or should I just fergettaboutit, and stick with raised beds?!

[suzfromWi]

We have semi clay soil here. We amended the garden over the years with compost of different things. Mushroom compost, cow manure, etc. We rototill every year to break up the soil and it grows wonderful veges....can be done...One nice thing is, it retains the moisture well....

[PonderosaQ]

I was very concerned about the same type of soil when I moved to VA from the sandy soil of the NJ shore. Oddly I have found everything grows very well as the clay soil is full of nutrients. The first year I was here I added leaves and shredded newspaper. I just couldn't find anything else short of buying mulch at some ludicrous price. Some spots are still hard to dig into but it's getting better after 2 summers. I mulch with spoilt hay and shredded paper. Each season we get out some more of the rocks. The first year to plant I would dig a little hole and fill it with water. After it had sit for a while I dug some more and then added more water. Seems like the trick if you want a good size hole. I'm sure others will have useful ideas for you. I'll just close by saying it's not as bad as people told me it would be!
PQ

[willow_girl]

Well, that is certainly encouraging news!

OK, I have decided not to kill myself now ...

Anything you've found you simply CAN'T grow?!

[fishhead]

Why not grow on top of the clay by putting your plants on the clay and covering them with compost and then mulch?

If you could till in some coarse sand it should help loosen the soil.

[RLStewart]

I also live and garden in Pa and have the same or similar clay and rock soil! Its not so bad after a couple of years of adding alot of compost and picking the biggest rocks out. Most things do grow pretty well in it and it holds moisture so you hardly ever have to water. I do have somewhat raised beds because its usually very wet here in the spring and I can get started earlier with beds. The beds are only built up a few inches though so its not like I brought in all new dirt, I just added enough compost to bring it up some. We have horses so there is always plenty of "compost" to put on the garden!

I have had some problems with root crops. They tend to grow crooked and gnarly. This year I double-dug a bed and added some sand so we'll see if that helps.

[whiterock]

My family farmed black clay for over 100 years here in Texas. It has a 10 inch expansion factor between totally dry and full moisture. When dry it will crack open with cracks big enough for a small child to fall in to their posterior, I know as I have done it myself. It will hold nutrients and water well, but needs lots of organic matter to maintain good tilth.

My Dad used to say, "If you will stick to it when it's dry, it'll stick to you when it's wet."

Ed

[Tricky Grama]

Here in N. TX. we have horrible black hard-as-a-rock clay then down about a foot is a layer of white rock. Great growing conditions-NOT.

What I did last fall was plant a cover crop. Being from the middle of KS (great farming country) I thought I'd plant alfalfa. But found out it doesn't do too well here. Bet it would in your part of the country. I planted 'hairy vetch'.

Then just dug it up & mixed it in w/dry molasses, lava sand, green sand, humates, compost, cornmeal. Spread a layer of mulch on top.

I have corn more than 'knee high', onions coming along, 'mesculen' greens that we've already had a salad or 2 from, peas coming up, carrots lookin' ok, but not one beet!


Patty

[suburbanite]

California clay is tan to reddish-brown.

Start off with a soil tester, find out how you're doing for pH, nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium...

Since you're starting from scratch you will probably have to buy some soil amendments for this year. Next year you'll probably find better sources or have your compost heap going.

In California the soil is slightly alkaline so here we add sulfur to the soil. If you're acidic you'll need lime. The instructions are on the test kit and/or the lime and sulfur bags for adjusting the pH.

You'll also want gypsum. Gypsum helps keep the tiny clay bits from sticking to themselves. Work in about an inch of gypsum to a spade's depth. (6-9 inches).

Make a container to keep your rocks in. Once you've collected several you may find that you have a uniform-enough collection to use in a decorative fashion somewhere else in the yard, as gravel, as part of the top of new concrete work/aggregate facing, as part of a small wall or stone-mosaic. I have a lot of white quartz rocks in my garden area that were spilled there during home construction; I often pick one out of the pile to use as a marker until plants come up. If the stones have no redeeming value check with your local trash company as most have a day or two per year where you get a 'freebie' drop-off of certain kinds of waste at the dump, sometimes including rocks and yard debris up to a certain weight limit.

Then you'll need a lot of organic material--compost, chicken manure, etc--that you need to work in, plus 1/2 to 1 inch of a washed sand (optional). But when you first work in the organic material, the buried stuff will partly be anaerobically digested, which consumes nitrogen rather than creating it for the first few months. So you'll need to supplement nitrogen (fish emulsion being good for that).

Some people will put bone or blood meal in their soil; 20 years ago I'd have said to do that but now since we don't test our cows for mad cow disease and the prion which causes it can survive in soil for 20 years (and its cousin that causes scrapie in sheep can survive in soil for 40 years but mad cow hasn't been around enough to know that long yet), I don't put beef-derived products into my soil anymore. I called Whitney farms who sell 'organic' fertilizers and they say that their bone and blood meal do not come from organic cows but from conventional cows.

[willow_girl]

RL, I guess we are gonna be neighbors! My new place is in Beaver County, near Hookstown. Glad to meetcha!

I have a horse and cows, so it's only a matter of time before I have good dirt ... LOL.

There is a sawmill right up the road from me, so I'll probably put sawdust down in their run-in shed, and put the dirty bedding into bins to compost. Because I'll have only a very small pasture to start with, I'll have to "patrol" it daily as well, and everything that gets scooped up will go into the compost bins, too!

[Beeman]

I have clay and it's not much for gardening. Raised beds work best. Our big garden has been turned,tilled and ripped for over 10 years and it still hardens up. I have added hundreds of truckloads of leaves,hay,manure and ground tobacco stalks. It's finally beginning to show signs of being soil, not many worms though.

[KCM]

You should be able to grow almost anything except the root crops (radishes, onions, beets, potatoes, turnips, etc). The heavy clay will not allow them to expand to any decent size. You will have to seriously amend your soil before you can successfully grow root crops.

The clay will retain moisture much longer than your sandy loam, so you will seldom have to water. Your melon crops should do especially well.

[suburbanite]

After amending the soil I was able to grow carrots the first year, but that was small-scale, square-foot gardening tactics for personal use, not homesteading/farmer's market stuff.

There are round varieties and stubby varieties of carrots developed especially for hard soils.

If the soil is too hard, all that happens with the radishes and carrots is that they start poking up out of the ground instead of growing down into it. You can then mound up the dirt a bit around them to keep them from getting green and bitter on top.

If you discover you under-amended your soil for the roots, then if you water lightly each day (to supplement your deeper watering for other veggies), to keep the top 3 inches damp most of the time, then the round root veggies will be able to grow fine even in the heavy clay, without popping up more.

[Maura]

Collect all that manure and compost it. If you just leave it where it drops you loose a lot of nutrients to the air. you can use a tumbler or pile, but do compost it. Fully composted manure or fully composted garden stuff, is the best you can put on your garden. Try lasagne gardening.

[Callieslamb]

I use my grass clippings as mulch around my vegetable plants. The clippings decompose and soften the soil; help keeps weeds down; and helps keep the clay from drying out. I don't add the clippings that have weed seeds in them -those I give to the chickens. Planting your plants a bit closer together will allow their foliage to help shade the ground around and under them also keeping it more moist and easier to work with.

One cheap, good thing I found - I grew Annual rye grass in my beds over the winter. The results are astounding. The soil is now soft and much darker. I didn't till the brown grass that died over the winter into the soil. I just let it lie righ tthere and am planting my tomatoes through the dead grass. A few of the seeds that didn't germinate are coming up here and there, but not very badly. I also put the pine shavings I use on the floor of my chicken coop in my garden. I clean out the coop only in the winter, since it has a wire floor for summer. I clean it once a month and spread the shavings on a different part of the garden each time. By time to plant in spring, the shavings and poo are decomposed so I till it in. The poo's nitrogen helps the pine shavings decompose faster.

Don't give up. It doesn't take years and it doesn't take a lot of money.

[suburbanite]

Fava beans are a great winter crop too, and fix 4 times the nitrogen of ryegrass.

[Patty0315]

I did not have time to read all the responses you got but here is what we have done. Are clay is so bad in fall and spring that you can loose a leg to it. We put lots of manure on it each fall . After we til and plant we use 6-12 inches of hay around the plants . This does 2 things .. it cuts down weeds and then breaks down by fall and we can til it under.

Everyone was right in saying clay hold moisture great but only after it has gotten lots of water,. It also dry brick hard when we have a dry spell. The cracks in the clay seem to go forever.

We grow more than an acre of garden and have for years. Each year are soil gets better and easier to work with.

Good luck

Patty

[ldc]

Willow girl + all, I second the gypsum; use a lot. it helps break up hard pan and clay. Everybodies' elses suggestions are also good; more tons of compost, leaves, anything that might break down into humus sometime. Good luck! Meanwhile, you might want to build one raised bed, for a little veg. action, until the other eventually improves. That's pretty much what I'm doing here, on hard pan clay. And yes, eventually the minerals in your clay soil will become available to what you're growing...something to look forward to! ldc

[suburbanite]

The other thing about clay soil--when you amend it, it *expands*. So you start off thinking you're just going to amend the soil and then wind up buying some edging boards and making a 'raised bed' out of the amended fluffed up native soil because otherwise it looks like you've got a pile of dirt in the middle of your garden.

My soil-amended square foot blocks are 4 inches higher than the starting soil was.

add: I had good results with melons last year despite not planting them until mid-july. This year I've got them out now. So I guess melons like clay.

[agmantoo]

Many of the large brick making plants are near me and the worlds largest manufacturer of brick making machinery is nearby. The red clay here is shipped worldwide as brick. As a farmer I only know how to farm the red dirt we have. The first thing is to never work the soil to where it is fine particles because when it rains those particles will form brick like soil. Second, when the soil is wet stay off it as it will pack. Otherwise the red clay has lots of advantages that go unrecongized such as it water retaining ability and it is often trace mineral rich. I do ammend my garden and I work it in an organic manner as I am going to consume the results. Here is last years effort.