Help with Very Hard Soil!

Last Summer we started a small raised garden bed. We filled the bed with "garden soil" from the Home Depot. This stuff is awful!!! It is rock-hard and forms little marble-like clumps that are almost impossible to break up. It came out of the bag that way, but I thought it was just dry and would get better once worked with and watered. Nope. It remained the same. I've never seen anything like this in my life. I have hostas and daffodils planted and the hosta survived, but didn't seem to really flourish. I'll find out about the daffodils come Spring.

My question is: How do I get this soil to soften up??? Is my only solution to dig it out and replace it with a better quality soil??

Help!

Thanks.

Add lots of organic matter.

If you can't actually till in the organic matter, pile it on top a la "lasagna gardening" and let the worms do the work. Takes longer, but it hasn't failed me yet. Good luck!

Any soil that is poor is great in a short time with the lasagna style. Almost immediate with tilled in compost, green manure, composted manure and what ever you have available (straw) to make the worms come alive. I have created a bed that was poor sandy soil and my acid loving plants were unimpressed so I dug them all up and redid the bed with Peat, Compost, fertilizer, and Pine needles. This is the project if you are interested. http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/591985/ I think the root loss and delayed growing by dig ups is minimal due to the rapid soil improvement the plant experiences. This is only a few months after the dig up and replanting of the above bed.

Can I do the lasagna method now in the Winter, or should I wait until Spring??

With Lasagna you won't get much activity until the temps are above 50F. But I would put it down what else do gardeners have to do now? Have at it. It will help keep the frost from hurting any plants. If you were doing the dig up like I did I wouldn't do that now. Have fun cooking Lasagna.

You could start now. Put down the cardboard anyway, and add materials as you get them. If you already have a stash of fall leaves that's a good start. You could add greens as you get them. I'm not sure how available greens might be to you at this time of year, but there's always coffee grounds if you can collect from a Starbucks or other source. (My biggest source of greens is grass clippings and of course there are none of those now), kitchen scraps, etc.

I'm trying to do something similar but skipped the cardboard/paper thing since I didn't have anything to kill off. I just mulched my front bed with about 8 inches of grass clippings and fall leaves in October. I did this around existing shrubs. My mulch is now reduced to and inch or 2 and well on it's way to being compost. It helped, I'm sure, that our weather stayed so warm for so long this year.

Karen

I still have a lot of leaves in the backyard that we haven't picked up yet, so I can start with those. Grass clippings will be impossible to come by now.

The whole point of doing lasagna gardening is that you dont have to dig. Just pile organic material over the place you are wanting to plant this spring. Anything you can find will work, leaves, straw, manure, coffee grounds. Spread it out and make it as deep as you can. By spring you should have much softer dirt to work with. Also you can use newspaper as layers.

It always seems that planting in one type of soil (such as what you bought in a bag) never works and it's always best to amend it with SOMETHING like bone meal, compost, peat and some of the soil dug up from the hole. I've done what you've done though thinking that fresh right-from-the-bag growing material will do the trick. I wish there were requirements like in food packaging that informed what exactly IS in the bag and WHERE it came from.