How To Garden In Clay Soil
Gardening is clay soil isn’t as bad as you might think. Yes it takes distribute of work to enhance it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the power to keep moisture and distribute of nutrients that other soils can’t. The drawback is that clay does not drain well and has pour aeration. This may all be corrected with the adding of organic material to the soil.
Clay is classified as a heavy soil. To boost clay soil you want to appreciate it’s traits. All soil is made of sand, silt and clay partials. Clay is the best of the partials, silt being intermediate and sand being coarse. The positive side of having clay in soil is it is adversely charged which gives it the power to keep hold of or absorb energetically charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to flourish from. This process is known as cation and is what makes clay a relatively fertile soil, unlike sand which isn’t adversely charged and can’t keep hold of or absorb the necessary nutrients and moisture needed for most plants to survive.
Improving the structure of clay soil is the only possible way to boost it to make it easier workable. You will need to understand the proportion of clay, silt and sand of the soil to correctly do this. Soil with more than a forty percent clay partials is generally classified as clay soil. To find out what the proportion of clay in your soil is you need to take a sample.
In collecting a good soil sample it must be a good representative of the garden area. If the soil looks different in other locations of the garden you should take samples of the numerous areas separately.To collect a good correct sample that represents your garden you must pick an area and scrape away about the 1st inch of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden spade about 6 inches deep. After you dig the hole take a piece of soil along the side of the hole the full depth and place the sample in a plastic sandwich bag. Label the bag if you are sampling more than one area.
Then the sample must be sifted and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and split any clumps. Let the sample completely dry for a day or 2. Once the sample is totally dry you will need to sieve the roots and little stone out of the sample and breakup any mounds of soil. You can use a wire mesh or even an old colander.
Once you have sifted the sample the very next step is to take the sifted soil and place it in a jar or a test tube and add a spoon of dry dish detergent. The detergent will really help to keep the soil particles separated. Now fill the jar or test tube with water, tighten the lid and shake the jar to dilute all of the sample. Check and make sure that there’s no material stuck to the jar. It should only take a couple minutes of shaking to get the sample diluted. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You will start spotting the sample to start separating inside an hour however it wont be completely settled out for a minimum of a day.
After the sample has settled you will notice the layers to the sample. The heaviest layer will be the sand on the bottom, silt will be the middle layer and the clay will be the topmost layer. Measure the total height of all three layers and then measure each layer separately. When you have all 4 measurements you can start to figure out the percentage for each layer. For example if the full amount of the sample in the jar is four inches high and the top clay layer is 2 inches you take the 2 inches of clay and divide it by the four in total height to get the p.c. for that layer. 2″ divided by four” equals .5 which is fifty percent clay.
A good loam or topsoil should have no more than 27 percent clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the percent of clay is high in your soil the right way to modify it is with organic matter. Do not work with clay soil when it is wet. It will only turn into clumps. When clay is dry you can break it apart and mix compost into it. The organic matter needs to be worked into the soil as deep as you can get it. Once you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn’t a one time job. You should keep adding organic material into the soil in the autumn when you finish gardening for the season. In the autumn a planting of a green manure will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with additional compost to add more organic matter to the soil. Click here : buy garden tools and top gardening books for more information.