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How To Garden In Clay Soil
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Gardening is clay soil isn’t as nasty as you would think. Yes it takes allot of work to enhance it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the facility to retain moisture and allot of nutrient elements that other soils can’t. The downside is that clay doesn’t drain well and has pour aeration. This may all be corrected with the adding of organic matter to the soil.
Clay is categorized as a heavy soil. To boost clay soil you want to understand it’s characteristics. All soil is made up of sand, silt and clay partials. Clay is the finest of the partials, silt being intermediate and sand being coarse. The positive side of having clay in soil is it is negatively charged thereby giving it the ability to hold onto or absorb positive charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to thrive from. This process is known as cation and is what makes clay a comparatively fruitful soil, unlike sand which isn’t negatively charged and can’t hold onto or soak up the essential nutrient elements and moisture required for most plants to survive.
Improving the structure of clay soil is the only real way to enhance it to make it more easily workable. You’ll need to understand the share of clay, silt and sand of the soil to properly do this. Soil with over a 40 % clay partials is normally categorized as clay soil. To find out what the share of clay in your soil is you just need to take a sample.
In collecting a good soil sample it has to be a good representative of the garden area. If the soil looks different in other locations of the garden you need to take examples of the numerous areas separately.To collect a good accurate sample that represents your garden you should pick an area and scrape away about the first in. of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden trowel 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 should be sieved and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and break any clumps. Let the sample completely dry for a day or two. Once the sample is completely dry you’ll need to sift the roots and small stone out of the sample and breakup any clumps of soil. You can use a wire mesh or an old colander.
When you’ve sieved the sample the very next step is to take the sieved soil and place it in a jar or a test tube and add a large spoon of dry dish detergent. The detergent will provide help to keep the soil particles separated. Now fill the jar or test tube with water, tighten the lid and shake the jar to water down all the sample. Check and ensure that there’s no material stuck to the jar. It should only take a pair minutes of shaking to get the sample watered down. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You’ll start seeing the sample to start separating inside an hour however it wont be absolutely settled out for at least a day.
After the sample has settled you’ll observe 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 top layer. Measure the total height of all 3 layers and then measure each layer separately. Once you have all 4 measurements you can start to figure out the p.c. for each layer. For example if the whole amount of the sample in the jar is 4 inches high and the top clay layer is two inches you take the two inches of clay and divide it by the 4 in total height to get the % for that layer. Two” divided by 4″ equals .5 which is 50% clay.
A good loam or topsoil shouldn’t have any more than 27 percent clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the percent of clay is high in your soil the most effective way to change it is with organic material. Don’t work with clay soil when it is wet. It’ll only turn into clumps. When clay is dry you can break it apart and mix compost into it. The organic material needs to be worked into the soil as deep as you can get it. When you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn’t a one-time job. You must keep adding organic matter into the soil in the autumn when you finish gardening for the season. In the autumn a planting of a green fertilizer will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with extra compost to add more organic material to the soil. Click here : http://makeagarden.com/garden-tools-2 and http://makeagarden.com/garden-books for more info.
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