Adding organic matter to clay soil is a good thing...but I'm going to do a little thinking out loud here.

My soil is clay, as is most of the soil in this area. Contrary to what most people think, clay soil is not necessarily bad. It is often a very rich soil, because the small particles it consists of has a very high affinity for binding nutrients. It can successfully be gardened, but one has to be very careful to till it or work it at just the right level of moisture because when worked too wet it is muck and when it is worked to muck and dries......it becomes like concrete.

I'd suggest that instead of adding grass clippings to improve your soil, you look up how to start a proper compost pile with a variety of vegetation added to it, instead of just grass. I started my garden in similar soil and have worked compost and chicken manure and bedding into it for over twenty years now. You can almost dig the rows with your hands. But, I had very successful gardens from the first year, when it was nothing but heavy, clay soil.

Learn how to work with it and not against it and start enriching your garden with compost. It doesn't happen over night, but you don't have to have black gold from day one, either.

The worms in pure clay soil are very thin, as if they are on a diet or hunger strike.lol
Once you get them into a soil with organic mater, leaves in particular,
they will get big and fat and multiply faster than rabbits.

I agree, clay soil is a good foundation for garden soil. When amended with
organic mater, its dranage will improve and will not harden up as much.
As with most eastern USA, soils are on the acid side, adding gypsum and wood ash
can can also improve clay soil, as combined with organic matter.

I read, with amazement, how a lot of gardeners who build raised beds on top of native clay soil,
fill them up with comercial topsoil and compost BUT NOT mixing in some of their own free clay soil.

cyrus

I think you have some wise advise here. This is exactly the soil I have started with this year and I have amended some for drainage (store bought manure/humus and pine mulch, with 12-10-10 fertilizer to counter act the loss of nitrogen due to pine breaking down and things do better in my clay soil than in my raised beds. To the point I may not make another raised bed!

I did break my up when it was wet, but not saturated, spongy wet it is easier to put the sod up and work, otherwise it was way too hard to get anything done....

calliope

Excellent post. I, too, have clay soil, and actually don't amend it that much by way of tilling or turning under compost. I just pile mulch on the top of the area where I'm growing things and let it work its way down as it composts. So I don't even think of my soil as clay most of the time. I do rely on the clay soil's rich nutrition to be trustworthy, so I don't fertilize a lot either. Well, except at planting time. Then I do fertilize seedlings, and usually it's enough to take them through the season.

I am planning to fertilize later in the year this season though, to see if it increases production.

And I never let the soil get dry enough, whether it's bare earth or mulched, to crust or get hard like concrete, though it certainly can if you ignore it. Even so, some seeds may have a difficult time breaking through the surface but that's easy to remedy by covering them with the ProMix I use to start seeds and in my containers.

we had lots of clay soil from digging a basement. When we built raised beds, we would put cardboard boxes down on the ground (covering and smothering all the weeds), then some leaves and old straw, then clay, then garden gypsum and mix that into the clay, then load of home-made compost and then more leaves and pine needles on top for mulch. Then let it rest for a month or so before I plant out my veggies. Some of you might have different view on this but it works great for us. And I now see fat forms and little baby worms in beds - more with every passing year

I do not have any experience with clay soil, however I know you can make bricks and pottery with it.

There is just a 'magic' stage where it's easily worked and most people's problems stem from not working it at that point. You can't work it wet, and you can't work it dry. Now, that being said, there is clay soil and there is that stuff you dredge up from the bowels of the earth during construction. It's not the same thing. Even clay soils have topsoil, though it might not be the dark, loamy stuff one thinks of when they think topsoil.

If you couldn't grow in clay, half of the Eastern U.S. would be denuded and it isn't. It supports rich forests and farmland. It's still challenging to work with. I don't always be able to get into my gardens on my schedule to do things. They tell me when I can get in and do it. LOL.

Calliope, I can relate!!!!!! LOL I think there is a 15 minute window when you can dig or plant in our clay soil!
I have to have raised beds lined with wire due to the HUGE community of gophers in the area! The only way I can incorporate native soil into my beds is to wait for the gophers to make a mound and dig up the crumbled dirt that the gophers bring up!
I think I'll make some adobe bricks out of my adobe soil and make a new raised bed! LOL NT

thanks for the replies guys

i worked the soil when it was dry,very hard work cause i only had a shovel and it was like 25 feet of grass to pull up.lucky im still only 18 and my body likes the work,after putting in a few bags of topsoil and some organic matter it now has at least 2 and a half feet that is easily workable. another question is can i add cedar or cypress mulch into it to keep it from comppresing during the season?

Cyrus, don't be amazed, lol. The reason many of us with hard packed clay put soil on top of it, without mixing any in is because it's nearly impenetrable by any non-mechanical means. If you don't own or want to rent a tiller, you could easily spend 2 hours just trying to dig out a 1'x1'x6" square.

I've found that over the last 9 or so months since putting in my raised beds, the worms have happily come out of the hard clay below and created insane populations in the more hospitable soil above, and in turn, the soil below has become slightly more workable. I expect that, over time and with the constant addition of organic materials, the soil underneath will get better and better.

I also garden on clay and it's true about catching it at the optimal time for cultivation. If you can get it roughly dug in the Autumn so the frost can get at it and shatter the clods that helps.You can then work it to a tilth in the spring, but wait for the right conditions. The other tip is to dig it with a fork rather than trying to use a spade on it. And of course get every bit of compost onto it you can find.

what jollyrd says

My story: I had an area behind our fenceline that was covered with kudzu (you southern's know what a nightmare that is) I was determined to get rid of it so I could use that area for a garden etc.

I had it plowed up 3 times *hired a guy with a cat tractor* and he dug down as deep as he could to break up the kudzu's roots, It lay untouched (covered with knee high weeds) for about 2 years, Every time the vine would pop up, I'd pull or dig it out..Fially it was gone...so I then proceeded to pull weeds and get a spot ready.

Shovel meet clay, shovel was denied, you literally could not penetrate the ground with the shovel unless it was completely soaked and then like others have pointed out, it was a muddy bog, that then dried up and was like concrete again and there was no way I could plant into it.

I then researched GW for ideas and heard of lasagne gardening...and figured what do I have to lose...gathered up about a dozen CRV loads of cardboard from the dollar store etc. also newspaper, neighbors grass clippings,pine needles, leaves whenever I could get them and 3 truck loads of moldy hay bales and I started putting it on, since I didnt have all those ingredients all at the same time every time, I did sections a little at a time and then kept adding and expanding it. took a few months..then I left it all winter.

When spring came (this was 2 years ago now) I went out to plant my maters and all but an inch or two of the hay was left (it was probably about a foot tall all piled up).

Shovel meet ground....AH, it was like buttah.

have not tilled this area since. Weed control is newspapers covered with free compost/mulch from the fairgrounds and I throw in any other composted material I can get.

It is very easy to tell where the OM has been added and where it has not. You can dig down probably a foot where it was added and about 4 inches elsewhere before you reach clay.

anney - you cover the seeds in the ground with pro-mix? Just to clarify, you dig a hole to the seed depth, then cover with promix not the ground soil?

If so, that sounds like a good idea!!!! Brilliant!! I am going to have to do that....

This is my first time ever trying to do a garden. So far, I've made two garden beds. I made a small one (4 x 2) and a little bigger one (4 x 4). The small bed I didn't trust the ground and was told to put cement tile down (the walkway thin brick), to prevent a lot of weed growth. The bigger bed, well... The ground was so uneven I decided to "try" and even it out some. I knew my backyard held water badly after a hard rain, and it gets soggy so bad my dog won't walk in it when we take him out. Long story short, as I began to rake, all of these roots started coming out of the ground. My neighbor brought her hoe and shovel over and then all of a sudden I started seeing worms everywhere, I started digging up these thick cement type bricks and rocks, and more long roots that either ran towards my house or towards the wooded area in my backyard. Being an avid gardener, my neighbor tells me I had good soil to grow my veggies in, I just needed to control the weed growth. Me being "green" about soil and planting, I asked about the worms and how to get rid of them because I was afraid they would destroy my veggies. She told me that having worms in my natural soil was good thing, even if my soil was red clay. So now, after raking, digging, raking and more raking this 4 x 4 area I put down my topsoil, but not my garden soil yet. Did I mess up putting down my topsoil first? And should I take all of the clay soil and rugged grass I threw on the edge of my woods and place them back into my bucket? I'm reading a lot about compost made with natural material, I have a slew of leaves and straw in my backyard I just toss to the edge of the woods. Is this the material I should be saving for my garden? Help, a new planter. :)

You need to listen to your neighbor. If you don't want to read about it, your neighbor probably understands how to make a compost pile. If you've been throwing organics to the edge of the woods for a long time, you probably have a lot of compost just laying there.