What does everyone use to amend this clay/rock/?? lovely Soil we have to make it conducive to growing different things?
I use a lot of sand and peat with my daylilies... we've added sand to the vegie garden area a few times, but every year it's the same, hubby plows the garden, discs, it looks and feels great, and as soon as July hits it's concrete again. I need to find a source for horse dung... we tried a rabbit, but it didn't produce enough poo for much more than a few flower beds. We've talked about getting a goat, but how do I separate the goat poo from the cow poo if they're in the same areas? LOL
We've even talked about having a load of pea gravel dumped in the garden... thinking that might help keep the soil loose... what does everyone else do?
Amending Soil
Melissa, I once read that adding sand to clay will give you concrete. I can't remember where I read it though. It's been several years ago.
I usually try to add compost, manure, peat and top soil. I never remove all the clay. It's not very economical unless you have manure (which you do) and have a compost bin. Then your expenses would be a lot less. You can also buy bagged humus which is supposed to be the very best. I've not bought it.
When I did my two daylily runs so I could move faster, I had compost, top soil, manure and sand mixed. These beds sit on top of the ground so I went with a complete soil that would not need ammended for a bit.
I had just read a thing about manure and had to go find it. According the writer: chicken and rabbit manure are higher in nutrients than most cow and horse manure. Sheep manure is higher in potassium than most other manures. As for telling goat and cow poop apart, I will take a sarcastic guess one is bigger? LOL
I think we are going to be looking at getting some bunnies and chickens. I want to see how much help I am going to get before I get in too deep. :)
My soil isn't rocky and it is fairly good and productive here in the corn belt and it only gets better further northwest. Still I wanted to have really loose soil for potatoes, carrots [Karoda for juicing], and melons. I added a large quanity of fairly fine sand and some local peat moss. Also the melon beds got well rotted horse manure.
The sand did not make concrete in my case...it made the nicest and loosest soil.....beautiful.
I've been really thinking about Chickens... for a while now. We had them when I was growing up...just not sure I want to do it, or can convince hubby to help me with the area they'll need.
Ha ha ha one is bigger! LOL I realize that would probably be the case... and I guess in thinking about it, goat poo is more pelleted like sheep poo, so it probably wouldn't be difficult to tell the difference... the difference would be me sending hubby out to pick up goat poo for me. He'd use the tractor to just "scoop" and I'd end up with cow and goat poo mixed together.
We need to get a Goat Fancier in here.... I know that goats love to eat poison Ivy.... and I've heard that you don't have to let goat poo cure like horse or cow.... but... we all know that animals spread plants with their poo.... so if I use goat dung in the garden, am I going to have a garden full of poison ivy? We definitely don't need any more of that growing around here.
Chele, it seems to me that someone said, and I can't remember WHO it was.... that you could use rabbit food almost like rabbit poo..... I wonder if that is true or my imagination?
Melissa --- go to the "Organic Gardening" and the "Soil and Composting" forums. You will find all kinds of helpful info on how to amend the soil. My suggestion to you would be to put a thick layer of manure (cow, horse,chicken, rabbit or whatever is cheap and available to you locally) over your garden area every fall and let it age over winter. Then have you DH plow it under in the spring. If you do this every year you will have great soil. Remember, if you stop amending your soil, it will quickly return to its original state.
Edited to add:
PS: In the fall, in addition to the manure, add all of the leaves you can get your hands on. It would probably be best to put the manure on top of the leaves to prevent the winter winds from blowing them away.
This message was edited Jan 21, 2006 3:29 PM
This message was edited Jan 21, 2006 4:08 PM
Remember, if you stop amending your soil, it will quickly return to its original state.
That's very true Yardman ...except for sand amending. That will stick to your soil's ribs.!!
Indy --- True, but you started with reasonably good soil to begin with. With her clay soil, sand is not an option. Sand + clay = concrete or adobe bricks.
Sometimes I wonder if the adobe theory is true in many clays...don't know but I wonder how scientific it is. It would not be hard to test with a bag of play sand. I no doubt do have some clay too and clay is very rich mineral wise. If you can get it softened, it is great. Compost, leaves, manure, and such are great.
I can send you a block of clay if you want to play. :) The clay here is awful. It is pretty much the consistency of the clay you can buy for kids to play with and has a bit of grit to it. Let me tell you, it dries HARD.
About 3/4 of my new yard is workable farmland. The other 1/4 is where the house and "yard" are. There has not been any ammending there. LOL
I can vouch for the Adobe.
When we first moved here we added sand and peat.
Got hypertuffa. ;)
Now we collect everyone's leaves in the neighborhood.
These lay all Winter.
Come Spring we vacuum them up and throw them in the compost.
Also grass clippings as we have no lawn.
(Well OK we DO actually have a lawn and I will match our lawn against any in existence.
Course when you have a 2 square yard lawn you can get REAL serious. lol)
We hole amend our soil.
If we have a 6" pot we dig a 12" hole at least 24" deep.
This gets filled w/ a top soil/compost/clay mix.
The advantage is we have very few weeds.
Each plant is an island.
Though after 17 years, and as tight as we plant, there is very little left of the original soil.
Ric
Indy --- You are obviously a gardner who has never had to deal with clay soil (lucky you!!). I do not care what any "theory" is, I personally have tried to amend my clay soil with fine and coarse sand (back when I was a gardening rookie). I do not know the technical term for the resultant product was, but I can tell you that whatever it was,I had to use a pick ax to break it up once it dried. A long, long time ago in my youth, I spent time with Native Americans in the SouthWest. I know that whatever I ended up in my garden was as hard as or harder than any adobe bricks I made with them. Their adobe recipe included clay, straw and sand.
I wanted to go back to what Badseed said
"I never remove all the clay. It's not very economical unless you have manure (which you do) and have a compost bin. "
That's the trick, we have removed the clay & put it in the compost bin & add the compostings to break down... It makes a big batch pretty quickly... The hole is filled with the last batch of clay+comopost turned good soil! It works well,
You still have to be careful to fork the hole, or you will leave a bowl for water to hang around in.
edited to see the quote
This message was edited Jan 21, 2006 5:27 PM
RE: Horse manure
We have a stabel at the local fairgrounds that just shovels all the horse manure over the hill behind the stable. It is free for the taking. Anyone wanting horse manure should call around to local stables. I am lucky enough to have a DH that will go and get the good stuff that is already ready to be spread :)
Janis
No doubt clay is a big bugaboo to deal with, but we did try the pea gravel approach--
We amended our existing soil with equal parts compost, gravel, and peat. They mixed it by the truckload at the supplier and delivered it. I think they said to stay away from Limestone gravel.
I don't know if it will work, but we shall see...
Also, for those who are near Jackson, Ohio, you are lucky! "Posy Power" (the soil amendment that many people swear by) is available by the truckload at reasonable prices. You can pick it up at the 'factory' there.
http://www.posypower.net/index.html
I would love to drive over there and get a semi load of it!
Shoot! I meant to say something about gravel above and I guess the kids interrupted. I had built them a play ground so many years ago and filled it with pea gravel. When we took the playground back out, I was forced to leave the gravel and work it around. I have to say the plants that went in there did very well. As I planted, I did add it compost/peat/topsoil and mixed it right into the gravel which was on top of and mixed into clay. The area had good drainage and allowed the plants to spread freely. If you have seen my pond pics from the last two years-all the plants around it were growing in about a 1/2 pea gravel mix. They did okay. LOL
Clay soil is horrible to deal with. The best thing that I have found is leaf compost. I buy it by the truck load. Western KY University has a program that collects leaves around the city of Bowling Green. They have some type of shredder, so it decomposes quickly. It is like black gold! So if you see a swirling pickup it might be me.
My Dad that is 84 and still farming, has a small herd of angus cattle. Manure is good for amending the soil. Vintage of course.
I like to grow fresh veggies too but I have just about quit at my place and just help at Dad's garden. He has been amending his for over 40 years. I do grow tomatoes in raised beds.
This message was edited Jan 22, 2006 1:26 AM
A friend of mine here in the area has a clay problem and his soil was almost yellow in the area he got the most sun and wanted to put his veggie patch. In fall he sowed winter wheat (some even refer to it as green manure) and tilled it in spring and was amazed at the difference. The soil had gone from yellow clay to dark brown and friable. I've heard other's report similar results.
You know, I just moved about 40 miles, door to door, from one house to the other and the clay at each is totally different! At my Cincinnati house, it is either reddish or beige with a gray silty line through it here and there. At my new house it is gray and I mean completely and totally gray! I dug a pond here in October and the scoops of dirt came out all crumbly and kind of nice to deal with. The same stuff, when wet, turns to oatmeal, then cement. It is freaky how the soil differs! I do think it will be a lot easier here to amend in that it does crumble and break. The stuff at the other house had to be chopped up or tilled to work anything into it.
I usually add bagged compost and peat and it helps but if you don't mulch it right away and the rain gets to the bare ground, you've got that crust to deal with all over again. With this last bed, I added bagged top soil too, it reminded me of a mixture of soil, very fine bark and some sandy stuff. The bagged stuff costs a fortune, I'm going to price some bulk material at a nursery this year and see how that compares, they will have to deliver so with the price of fuel, it may not be any cheaper.
I went that route when we moved in over the fall. I had mass amounts of plants that had to be moved and replanted quickly. The going rate around here was $30-40 a cubic yard. Each truckload set me back $400 including delivery. OUCH! Oddly enough, the biggest company around here added a couple of bucks a yard, for addition for the soil but I found a local guy who charged the same price no matter what he mixed. He said he was going to have to charge me a bit more for the sand he added because he had to go to the quarry and get it. In the end, he didn't add anything to the price. :) It was much cheaper than doing it by the bag. Now I need some critters and a compost area. LOL
I lived in a river valley ever so briefly. It was wonderful. I no longer live in that area. To me its amazing how variable the soil can be in one small plot of land. I have everything from clay to loam, wet to dry. No consistency.
A few miles northeast of me is this: http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/branches/MuckCrops.htm . The soil is so rich in organic matter, during dry seasons they ban burning on exposed soil, because it can catch fire.
Another story
http://extension.osu.edu/~news/story.php?id=2535
and here
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3869/is_199910/ai_n8871417
-Joe
My beds are all being raised slowly over the years. I use rotted sawdust rotted mulch rotted leaves and manuer in my beds. Each year I use hard wood mulch to top layer the beds this rots out every year also in the fall the hardy tropical plants are covered with shredded leaves or rotted hard wood mulch come spring this is spread out over the landscape. My soil is black gold. Its a lot of work but the plants love it.currently I have a 15 ft tall pile of rotted wood chips on our back acre useing a tractor to flip it helps it to rot out faster taking a sprayer and spraying fertilizer on the pile will make it rot almost twice as fast.
The silt that washes over fields that are right on the river is amazing stuff, here, it's a shame that most of the land right on the river is becoming camp grounds. Those campers sure do grow some pretty maters though. :-) Even here, there is such a difference in my soils. The soil around the house is black and just about anything thrives in it. Where my garden is, however, once grew tobacco... so it was basically stripped down to nothing, Tobacco takes a lot from the ground it grows in.
I've "almost" got hubby convinced to give me an area around one of the barns for my tomatoes and green beans. That soil, too is rich and obvioiusly filled with organic matter, the only problem is, he's going to have to move fence to give it to me....;-(
Someone above mentioned leaves. We always rake all the leaves to the garden and he generally runs the plow through one time to keep most of them there. We've got a few friends who stable at River Downs, so we might be able to get one of them to bring us a load of poo... we've also thought about having a load of ash dumped on it.
I was wondering if anyone has one of those fancy compost barrels that you turn daily? Do you like it? Could you make one from a plastic 55 gallon drum? Anything to save money to buy new plants.
They are supposed to be really easy to make from a few wood pallets. I think MollyMc and Darius just posted a pic of one they did. I also have a book where the author suggests making them out of cinder block. You use cinder block between the different grades and in the front and use a chicken wire fence on the back side.
I've heard mixed reviews on the tumblers. There might be a post about those on the tool forum or maybe the soil forum. I remember seeing someone ask about them.
I'm making one now as a matter of fact.
We had some damaged 55 gallon trash cans come back so We figured why not give it a try.
BTW I have a 44 gallon Manure Tea Barrel going.
I'm here to tell you the stufff tastes terrible.
But then I don't use milk or sugar in my Tea.
Ric
Bluegrass
My husband and son made me 2 compost barrells.
I love them. I also want to make me one out of the pallets. I have lots of scraps to put in them and I mulched up leaves this fall and put in a trash can to use this winter. I love that black gold .
Pauletta
Do you that compost, place grass clippings in also? I have a 30 gal. container that I have been using but I need something larger.
Do you that compost, place grass clippings in also? I have a 30 gal. container that I have been using but I need something larger. We mow almost an acre, so it could add up quickly.
We have RED clay. I mean RED. We had a house built on the back side of the farm where cows had fertilized for years. We had sold cattle and cut good hay off land. When the builders dug for our house, they piled top soil on ground then clay on top of that. After house was built, they pushed soil back around leaving clay on top for about 30 inches. Yes, I have dug deep enough to see the good soil way down there. Every time I plant I dig a hole and put peat moss, etc. Now farther out in the fields is the good dirt where no one has dug. That's where most of my daylilies are.
I have a 3-year-old double weeping cherry tree by the house whose roots are coming on top of the ground. I think that's because roots ran into the clay and said OUCH! Anybody know what I can do for that tree?