In my opinion, all soil unless contaminated can eventually be cured. The question is how much time, money and energy is someone willing to expend to make truly unhealthy soil healthy?

Sometimes when soil is that bad, it's more economical and practical to strip it out and start over with something better.

Val

I have an area in my yard that was crappy dirt over rocks, which were down about 8 inches. There had been grass and ivy growing in this area, and when I started working on getting the rocks out, the dirt was dead; it was like dust, or NYC sidewalk dirt, and it was horrible to work with. As I de-rocked, I mixed in compost, grass clippings, shredded newspaper, fabric, thread, and yarn scraps - any organic matter I could get my hands on. It's been two years, and already the dirt is more soil than dirt, and there are lots of worms. It wouldn't even grow weeds before! So,yes,you can resurrect dirt, and it won't take forever. Good luck!

People in many places have taken barren soils, deserts, added organic matter and moisture and converted those barren places into lush gardens. The only thing most "bad" soils need is organic matter to become productive again. If the soil is contaminated with petrochemicals then maybe it will need to be removed, although there is some research that indicates even those types of soils can be reclaimed by adding organic matter to them.

That "New York sidewalk dust" got into my veg. garden and the dirt up next to my house is fill dirt.
lisanti, I wouldn't have thought of using fabric, thread and yarn. Love it! Earth to earth huh? Leslie

Wow...love this place. Thanks for the info. Im having fun learning about this gardening thing......who knew?

Dirt is a very broad word and can mean just about anything that your ground is made up of. So how to amend it without knowing is almost an impossibility. For instance you can have a base of hard pan made up of extremely hard clay. This clay may be high in mineral content with several minerals or can be just one primary mineral like calcite or iron ore. Neither would be conducive for improvement by trying to improve with small amounts of organic matter. The most efficient way would to be import decent soil and build from there. One the other hand some hard pans can be improved easily because the basics are there and need to be unlocked so to speak. Addition of organic matter improves drainage and make the nutrients available to the plants.
As far as clay soils are concerned, I am not an advocate of digging down into the clay for improvement. The reason is that clay normally holds water extremely well. When one diggs a hole and improves it then a bucket if formed. Long hard rains can fill that bucket, no matter what the size. I much prefer building on top and letting the worms and microbes do there job on the clay.

My veggie garden is hard packed red georgia clay. For two years I have been trying to recondition the soil with top soil and organic matter (still no worms). I have had many bad disease problems (early blight, anthracose, powdery mildew, wire stem, and two different unknown diseases on my cucumbers). I have given up and am scrapping off the top four inches. Building raised beds over what is left of the "soil". Then adding topsoil, compost, peat and vermiculite in the beds. Do you see any problems with this.

Tells us about this "topsoil" you are getting. What is it? Is it really worth spending money on? Would you get better results without that "topsoil"?
I have seen stuff sold as "topsoil" that ranges from spent foundry sand to loam, but that loam very rarely because there is not that much of it. "Topsoil" is, very simply, the top 4 to 6 inches of soil from someplace and it might have some organic matter in it or it might not.
The only thing, yolos, that your Georgia red clay needed was organic matter. A professor of soil science at North Carloina State University, Keith Baldwin, wrote an article about amending the red clay in North Carolina a few years ago that appeared in Taunton Presses Kitchen Garden magazine. For some reason he used peat moss, a non renewable resource, but tree leaves would be a much better material to use.

You came to the right place.

The first and most important step is a soil test. Poor soil can be fixed, but contaminated soil is usually not worth the time and expense of remediation. A soil test will determine if the "dirt" is contaminated, and also what it lacks. From there, you will know how to improve it. The next step is to define your time scale. How soon do you want to plant, and what do you want to grow? If you have the luxury of time and space, you can apply whatever dry amendments you need and plant some green manures. If you have lots of labor available, you can double dig, trench-compost, even sift. There are even some plants that can remove some contaminants (my definition of "unhealthy soil"), but that is an extreme and probably unsustainable practice for most people.

To test any soil for many "contaminents" you need to know what to tell the lab to test for. The soil tests done at most all soil test labs is for nutrients and pH and not foreign material. The soil test for lead is fairly expensive as is a test for other heavy metals.

I would just like to second kimm. A lot of times people will think, "I know I'm not testing for any specific contaminants but if it is contaminated something is sure to look out of wack." That is not at all the case. You do indeed have to test for exactly the contaminant that you are looking for.

Novascapes wrote:

"As far as clay soils are concerned, I am not an advocate of digging down into the clay for improvement. The reason is that clay normally holds water extremely well. When one diggs a hole and improves it then a bucket if formed. Long hard rains can fill that bucket, no matter what the size. I much prefer building on top and letting the worms and microbes do there job on the clay."

I second that - both the bucket image and solving it with raised beds. Yolos, I would not scrape off the soil you have been working on. Build raised beds on top to add new soil above your clay. The clay you've been working on will be better for underneath the raised beds than the unamended clay subsoil beneath. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

We've done this with our clay, although we didn't buy a load of topsoil, but just added compost, occasional bags of store bought topsoil or compost, sandbags leftover after floods, etc. The beds are now 4-6" higher than the surroundings, they drain better in spring and the soil is much more porous.

Thanks for all your input on my attempts to improve my garden. But let me take a moment to set the stage. I have lived in Georgia for 35 years and lived in 3 different homes. Every house had the hard clay and it usually takes 3 to 5 years to make the soil viable enough to enjoy vegetable gardening. I am not getting any younger. I am tired of carrying a pickax out to the garden to weed or plant a tomato. Double dig - ha. The joke in my family is that I am not going out to the garden to pick tomatoes but pick rocks and clay clods out of my garden.

But, all that aside, the biggest problems are the soil born diseases. I realize that there are different methods you can use to try to minimize the problem such as soil sterilization etc. But my broccoli getting wire stem was the thing that pushed me over the edge. The fungi that causes wire stem remains in the garden "indefinetly".

This fall I built a small 4' x 4' x 12" raised bed. I filled it with Mel's mix (1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost). What a joy that little raised bed is to work in.

So, I am going to build 512 sq ft of raised beds ( 4 beds 4' x 32' x 12"). They will be sitting on the clay soil after the top 4" of clay and hopefully all the bad bacteria/fungi/pathogens have been removed. Filling the bed with Mel's mix is too expensive. There are 3 different businesses near my home that sell soil by the truckload. I will first examine the soil at each business and determine if it is appropriate for my beds. Then I will add composted horse manure which I can get inexpensively, and add compost that I have been hording and maybe some vermiculite.

I have had my soil tested recently. Just a simple test done by the county extension office. I also have taken in many diseased plants to get their advice about identifying and treating the diseases. They have twice recommended strong fungicides which I do not want to use in my garden.

So, as toxcrusadr said, I am going to "throw the baby out with the bath water" and start fresh. I deserve it after all these years of hacking up the clay. I want to pick tomatoes and not rocks. I want to go out to the garden with one of those fancy weeding tools instead of a pickax. Time is of the essence.

Well that makes a lot of sense yolos. I have similar problems - rampant diseases and pests that I just don't have the time or desire to nuke with enough chemicals to kill. I think I actually have fusarium wilt in the soil which is almost impossible to treat or get rid of. Plants wilt and die. I don't blame you for starting fresh.