From personal experience the fastest and bestust way to treat heavy clay soil is by feeding microbes and bugs. They'll do the work for ya. Here's what I do:

1) Dig it out (a foot or so. 2 foot is best!) to an area that will handle your kitchen scraps.
2) Fill back in with soil.
3) Soak with water real well.
3) Cover it with cardboard, mulch, anything to keep the light away from the soil so the bugs can do their thing.
4) Water/Soak mulch.

Next batch of kitchen scraps:
Dig. Dump. Water. Repeat nearby.

You still have a lot of time before spring truly arrives. You can start a compost now to top off these spots before planting if you hot compost. This will not give you a big area, but it's a fast start.

I've done it for individual planting sites instead of entire beds. Works good. Quick and dirty.

I've gardened in clay soil my entire life and it isn't as bad as it sounds. Most clays are high in mineral content, making them very fertile soils. I've gardened in both blackland prairie clay in Texas and in red clay here in Oklahoma. What they are lacking is organic matter and air space between the pores of soil. Remember that, technically speaking, the plant roots do not grow in the soil itself--they grow in the air space between the pores of soil. Since clay particles are very fine and clump together en masse, there's not much air space in clay soil, and that is why plant roots can struggle in it. Just add whatever organic matter you can get your hands on to the soil, and keep adding it every year. You cannot just add organic matter once and then you're done because the organic matter decomposes and gets used up. Rototilling the soil exposes organic matter to air and heat, which makes the organic matter break down more quickly, a phenomenon often described with the use of the phrase "heat eats compost", so in order to make your organic matter last as long as possible, once you've added it to the soil, do not disturb the soil by rototilling and cultivating if you can avoid it. Growing in a no-till manner as much as possible will prolong the life of your organic matter and will help the soil develop better structure and tilth.

You can use any organic matter you can get your hands on---compost, grass clippings, chopped/shredded autumn leaves, peat moss (not my favorite thing because it is dead whereas compost is alive with microbial life, but even just one bale of it added to a garden bed can really improve the soil drainage), composted manure, stable cleanings (usually a combination of straw or other animal bedding and manure/urine), old spoiled hay or straw, or mushroom compost.

Many larger cities give away compost to their own residents or sell it at a low cost. You might check and see what your city has, if anything. You also can watch Craig's List and Cheapcycle for people selling or giving away manure, stable cleanings or old spoiled hay (often listed as mulch hay).

You also can grow green manure crops (similar to cover crops, but meant to be left in the soil to decompose or worked into the soil after they've finished growing) in the fall and winter to improve your soil for spring planting, but that's more of a long term project.

One of my favorite ways to improve our dense red clay (great for making flower pots but not great for garden beds because it drains so slowly) was to use partially decomposed logs I found in our woodland, hacked to pieces with my trowel or hoe (if they were very-well decomposed, they were mostly compost already and fell apart when I touched them) but you can get the same effect by purchasing bags of soil conditioner at someplace like Home Depot. It doesn't always say soil conditioner on the bag, but what you're looking for is a product that contains fine pieces of bark and either compost or humus.

Remember that you only need 3-5% organic matter in your soil to make it a good growing medium, so you don't have to add tons of organic matter the first year--just enough to break up the clay a little and reach that 3-5% goal. However, because the organic matter gets used up, you always will need to add organic matter in some shape, form or fashion. Nowadays, I add grass clipping mulch to my beds every time we mow and that is about the only new organic matter the beds get, other than a layer of chopped/shredded leaves (we just run over them with the lawn mower and catch them in the grass catcher) in fall or winter. If you just add your grass clippings or chopped/shredded leaves to the tops of the beds every year, the earth worms will eat them and break them down, depositing earthworm castings (worm poop) in the soil as they work. You can attract worms to the garden beds by putting down a layer of newspaper or cardboard on top of the ground and dumping grass clippings and/or chopped/shredded leaves on top of it.

The method Bon described is known by several names, and the name by which I knew it when I was growing up was "sheet composting". My grandfather improved his soil that way, but what he did was dig trenches in between his garden rows, and then during the growing season, he dumped all the kitchen scraps (not including meat or grease/fat) into the trenches and raked soil over them. Not a single banana peel went into the trash, and he didn't have a compost pile, he just sheet composted right there in the garden, year-round. If you use that method, then this year's trenches in between rows becomes the area where you plant next year's garden rows and you put next year's trenches in the row areas where plants grew this year.

All clays are different, and on our property we have various kinds of clay---very dense red clay with little organic matter or sand in it, a sandy-clay mix that might be 10% sand and 90% clay in the back yard where the dog yard is, and even an awful gray clay and yellow clay in the area our son choose to build his house. I was shocked when he broke ground and found the yellow clay and adjacent gray clay. He won't be putting his orchard or his garden in that clay!

You also can improve clay by adding sand (this is controversial) to it. However, to get the best results, you cannot add only sand---you need to add both sand and organic matter. Without organic matter, sand + clay can give you something similar to adobe, but with organic matter, it is a fine growing medium.

In Texas, where venomous snakes were not a problem on our property like they are here in Oklahoma, I built raised beds for both ornamental gardening and edible gardening using a method called hugelkultur, which basically means you bury logs and pieces of wood and woody brush in your soil and it enriches the soil as it breaks down. That was the best soil I ever had. The reason I have used it less here is that we are overrun with venomous snakes, particularly timber rattlers and pygmy rattlers, but also copperheads and (in wet areas) cottonmouths as well, and the hugelkultur beds become populated by snakes. However, to get the hugelkultur effect without bringing in enough big pieces of wood to attract snakes, I have added bags of bark mulch to my soil, rototilling it in. In the horticultural world, this is considered a huge no-no, but I ignored the conventional wisdom and did it anyway. This works best with small bark like pine bark fines, but I've also done it with large chunks of wood, and it hasn't caused me any problems. I thought when I did it that I'd have big chunks of bark in my soil for years. Ha ha ha. We have a lot of drought down here, and heat eats compost, so even the big chunks of wood are gone in a year or two. I was surprised by how quickly they break down.

Don't expect to have perfect soil in the first year or two or three. Just try to add enough organic matter to the soil to get that 3-5% and your soil will get better and better over the years. In our early years, I found that plants grew pretty well even in barely-amended clay, but I did have to have raised beds to improve the drainage, even though the percentage of organic matter in the soil was decent. Rain often comes in two types here---way too much rain at once or none at all, and it is the organic matter in the soil that helps the plants get through both of those kinds of rainfall. I was really pleased with the quality of our soil after just a couple of years, but then it keeps getting better every year. I started really small, with a garden that might have been 25' by 40', and then each year for the first few years we made it bigger by adding a new area. I've always had big compost piles, but in more recent years I do a large percentage of my composting in the pathways between raised beds. I just put grass clippings and chopped/shredded leaves in the pathways throughout the growing season as mulch on the pathways. Over the course of the growing season, the mulch decomposes in compost. Then in late winter before planting time arrives, I scoop up the compost from the pathways into the beds and toss it on top of what is left of last year's mulch in the growing beds. It is so much easier to scoop it from pathways to adjacent beds than it is to haul in wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of compost from a compost pile outside the garden.

I do still maintain compost piles outside the garden, but 90% of the compost that goes into my garden is either last year's mulch, left in place in the garden beds after it has broken down into compost, or last year's mulch from the pathways, scooped up onto the beds after it has decomposed. This improves your soil from the top down, which is exactly how the soil is our woodland is built, year after year, decade after decade. Nobody goes into the woodland and rototills to work organic matter into the soil, right? It is improved from the top down, and that's how my garden soil is improved too. I rarely rototill or cultivate the soil mechanically at all any more and that is better for the soil than being worked heavily. You might, however, choose to rototill your organic matter into your soil the first few years to get the organic matter down more deeply into the soil, but you really don't have to. The earthworms and other soil-burrowing critters will do it for you.

I have been experimenting with alfalfa pellets. They are cheap at places like Atwoods. It is sold as animal feed. Alfalfa

I look forward to the rabbit feed spilling over into the bunny berries where they get composted or tossed into the garden beds. I like it for potential nitrogen effect, but I cannot prove this.

It does contain hormone, Triacontanol. When I want quick root development, tho, I usually cut off small branches from my poplar tree and steep. I pour the water directly over the root zone.

I love alfalfa and used it a lot in our early years when we were building the soil. I like it as a soil amendment, and as mulch, and I also like to use alfalfa tea to feed plants gently. You use it the same way you use compost tea. Because it contains the growth hormone, it can really perk up a plant whose growth is lagging.

Thanks for all the tips. I need to make a list and then go price everything out. But now I know what to look for.