How We Improved Our Clay Soil

 

In gardening, soil is everything. 

It's the lifeblood of your plants. They pull their water from it, their nutrients from it. If your soil is unhealthy, so are your plants. 

Planting garlic cloves in less than ideal soil our first year here. 

When I moved to this new-to-me yard 4 years ago, the soil here was bad. Like... really bad. So hard that I couldn't even get a shovel into it to plant bulbs, flowers, or garlic...

It was devoid of nutrients, rocky, dry, hard... well, the above picture shows what it looked like that first year here. 

The soil was grey from lack of nutrients. 

I have dealt with 'bad' soil many times in the past though, so knew that this was all fixable. Just needs time and lots and lots of organic matter. 

Soil doesn't get 'old' and unusable, it just gets hungry.  

There is no need to dig it out, no need to double dig, no need to dig at all. While it does not happen immediately, you can rebuild all sandy soil, clay soil, weedy soil... all the types of poor soil. 

As with all things in nature, natural organic gardening takes time to happen. 

The frustrating part to us modern day gardeners who are so used to everything being almost instant, all things natural take time to happen.  

The good news is that though fixing your soil, turning it from bad to great soil is going to take a few years, you can make a huge difference in just one year. It will then jut get better and better as you feed it annually. 

Garlic, cosmos, saponaria, and a young Amur Cherry tree in late spring. 

This is the same bed as the rocky soil you saw above with the rocks in it. We fed it with straw and compost the first year, raised it just a bit (one 2x6 board high) the next year and filled it with more compost. As the compost breaks down, we top with more compost. 

Here in a zone 3, nothing perennial survives the winter in raised beds. However, low beds like this work really well. They give you a few more inches to pile on more compost, leaves, mulch, or garden soil. Fix up your soil with whatever organic matter you have access to.       

The easiest way of all is to feed your soil a whole lot of compost. The more you get for your first round of amendments, the better it will be and the sooner you will see results. 

You can also use well rotted manure of any kind. 

I find that horse manure is very weedy so I avoid that one, but any of the bagged manures you find at shops are all very well rotted. If you have a friend with chickens, that 'poo' is garden gold. Cow, sheep, llama, bunny, goat... it is all fantastic. Mushroom compost adds a lot to soil structure to fix heavy soil and add moisture retention, but has a bit less nutrients than the others. 

It is all fine. Seriously. Use it, any kind at all, add it liberally. 

Ruby Tuesday loved to be the 'King(Queen) of the Castle" when we had bulk soil or compost dropped off. Here, she is not happy that we are taking the last of her pile : ) 

For the first few years, aim to add 3 to 6 inches and you'll soon notice an amazing difference.   

Now... there are a couple of ways to do it. The preferred way is to just layer it on top of the garden in the fall or early spring and let rain, nature, and soil life disperse it. You can lightly fork it in if you have poor soil structure to begin with, as it will not harm it further, but it truly is not necessary.     

If your bed is weedy, you weed it as best you can first and then cover with cardboard (or weed barrier paper). Overlap the edges, layer several inches of compost on top. It is now ready to plant into or walk away to plant it up in spring.   

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You will need to keep feeding your garden annually. If you are growing foods in it, top dress your bed with an inch of compost/manure each year. 

I like to do this in the fall, after I have cleaned out the veggies, as compost and amendments are easily still found at the shops. 

Spring is also fine, try to do it early in the year, let things sit for a bit before planting. Charles Dowding (the kind of no-dig) says that you can plant it up right away. I like to give it a bit of time. Either way is fine! Seriously! 

My lawn-free front yard is in year two now. In year one, we layered 4 inches of compost over the yard before planting. 

Flower beds/foundation plantings/perennial beds can be fed the same way. Aim for a lot of compost in year one (and two, if needed). Afterwards you can either rake out a small amount over the whole bed, or if you mulch your beds, as I do, add a couple shovelfuls of compost around each shrub or tree, when needed. 

This rhubarb grows to be twice this size! 

Feed your rhubarb, too! I give mine a half a bag of compost/manure annually so it is very healthy, grows very large and provides us with loads of stalks.   

Dry leaves on top of a garden bed, being held down by a trellis so they don't blow away. 

All types of organic matter will feed your soil life, which in turn will feed your flowers and veggies. 

In the fall, rake your leaves right into the flower beds, shrub beds, pile them on your garlic bed or empty food garden. Rake them in between your flowers, shrubs, and raspberry canes. Wherever they will fit, get them in there. 

At first, your leaf pile will be a foot high. By spring, it will just an inch or two high, as in the picture above. Leave them on top of the bed all summer, and they will have pretty much broken down entirely by the end of the season.

Grass clippings layered on top are also great, as is straw and wood chips. Do not dig them in or they will leach nitrogen from your soil. 

Make your own compost in a compost tumbler (it's so fast and easy). 

You can also bury your veggie scraps from last night's dinner or trench in the lettuces that bolted in the heat. Anything that will break down can be used to feed the soil. 

*No meat, no fats, and I would also leave out things that take a long time to break down, like avocado pits. 

These raspberries are fed with apple leaves each fall. 

Each year, I rake the fallen apple tree leaves directly into that raspberry patch to break down and feed the soil organically. The soil becomes richer, full of nutrients as the leaves break down, and also retains more moisture. 

This bed along the fence was much like the soil in the first picture, super hard and impossible to dig into. Now, the raspberries are loving life, the monkshoods (further down on the left) are nearly 6 feet tall! Everything is thriving. So much so that I never have to water these raspberries, even in a drought year. Nor do they need any kind of fertiliser.  

A zucchini plant growing in a raised bed full of yummy compost. Yes, that is completely normal colouring on the leaves. 

So, to sum it all, feed your soil. Add compost, manure, leaves, grass clippings... annually. The more you feed your soil organic matter that it can break down, the better it will get. 

It takes time, but all the best things in life do, eh?  

Happy Gardening ~ Tanja