Starting a new garden

We have clay, very hard clay as it is dry right now. Do we till it up and mix new dirt with it or do we pile new dirt on top of the clay and hope everything grows?

Our original plan was to
1) till up clay with heavy duty tiller (hopefully neighbors tractor)
2) put down lots of good soil
3) till it up again to mix clay and black dirt
4) hope for the best

A lady told me today to just pile the dirt on the clay and not till it up. It's getting very close to planting time What do we do?

Chickadee

How much dirt were you planning to put down on top of the clay?
Guess you could plant things that aren't root crops like potatoes and carrots etc. they wouldn't do good on that situation.
I would get some good soil, composted manure, even a few bails of peat moss and work the heck out of it. If you had access to some bigger sand that would help also.
We have heavy clay soil here and have over the years added and added to it so that now it is pretty good. One nice thing about clay is it doesn't dry out as fast.
Good luck with your garden and you still have a week or so to get it planted.

The best thing you can do is pile on the compost. I can remember my soil teachers back in college stressing that it is way too much work to try to change the structure of a soil, and that the best solution to any problem is to pile on the organic matter. Compost is great, peat is good to use too.

And actually planting certain deep rooted crops is one of the best ways to break a heavy clay spil. Potatoes are one of the best at breaking clay. This is because to plant sends out little rhizomes through the soil, and it forms potatoes by curling the end of the shoot and just starting to grow fatter. Daikon radishes are also great at improving clay. If you can be patient enough, planting a cover crop of clover and rye is one of the best things you could possibly do, but that would mean waiting until next year to plant vegetables...

Don't undervalue that clay. I have hard clay as well. Once you learn to garden in it, you will love it. Add as much organic matter as you can get your hands on. I rotate my garden every year. On the off years I get hubby to do a couple swipes with the air drill and plant a good thick crop of field peas. When they start to bloom, we till them under as green manure. I also throw my shavings from the coop on the garden. Careful not to add to many shavings and chicken manure as it is really hot. Potatoes grow great in it, but you have to be on top of the billing as they pop out of the ground easily.

Not a very good gardener, but will toss in my two bits.

You can embark on a full scale battle to amend your clay and slowly, over YEARS and with much sweat and weeping, attempt to make it into a workable soil. OR skip that step and haul in something to garden in.

If you want to plant acres of garden and can and freeze and pickle and dry, then you might have to undertake the Clay Busting Battle. However, if small scale is more your style, I would consider raised beds. With good sun exposure, water and good soil, you can produce a lot out of raised beds! And the bonus is in ALberta, with your shorter growing season, a raised bed heats up sooner and gives you a short jump on the growing season, you can plant them a bit sooner (cover for frost protection).

I have built two hugelbeets here. Google it. Essentially a deliberatey constructed pile of the following: bottom layer, dead wood. Trunks, large limbs of DEAD trees laid raft-like on the ground. Over this you dump rotted organic matter like leaves, lawn clippings, straw/hay that had been piled and heated for a year, hopefully to kill off most of the seeds. Over the organic matter you pile your soil. Now it looks like you've buried something in your yard. I call mine the burial mounds. The rotting of the wood and organic matter add heat to your soil and again, jump starts the growing season. Each year you can add a bit more manure/soil to the top and plant away. These are obvioulsy not good for crops like carrots or beets. But for melons, zuchinni, squash, cucumbers, the BIG plants they work great! Also a good way to use dead brush without having to light a big fire. But make sure it's DEAD! Willow trunks can look dead and when you bury them, the darn things start to grow and you have a forest in your hugelbeet.

I think your decision will be determined by how BIG you want your garden. ANd if you have materials to build raised beds and someone to swing a hammer. But if it was me, I'd leave that clay where it was and not disturb it.

Thanks everybody!!

Chickeesmom....We were planning on getting a few dump truck loads from a farmer down the road.

Country Thyme Farm.....very tempting to hold off and work on getting the soil ready for next year. We could plant our garden at my in-laws which is on the same 1/4 as us.

Bowker Acres.....thanks! some days that clay drives me crazy :/ Good to know it has a purpose

Uno....We would like to have raised beds but still low. I heard they are great for all kinds of reasons! It would be great to have higher raised beds as my knees and back are terrible. That sure is a good thought And we have a tonne of dead wood here. I'll have to share this with my hubby!

A lot of people here don't put their gardens in until the first week in June. We have a little bit of time but if we waited we sure would have nice dirt for next year.
What to do, what to do....

We took out our raised beds as they were too hard to till with the garden tractor and made it hard to till the rest of the garden. I wish we had some clay as we live on a gravel bed which has it good points, but not for gardening. Our best soil comes straight from the cattle yard- black and easy to work. My wife says every year that the garden is going to be smaller and every year it grows larger. In a sense we do have raised beds because the cattle and chicken soil is spread on top of the gravel. The western portion of the property is glacial silt but this is steep hillside close to the houses.

Bowker Acres wrote:Don't undervalue that clay. I have hard clay as well. Once you learn to garden in it, you will love it. Add as much organic matter as you can get your hands on. I rotate my garden every year. On the off years I get hubby to do a couple swipes with the air drill and plant a good thick crop of field peas. When they start to bloom, we till them under as green manure. I also throw my shavings from the coop on the garden. Careful not to add to many shavings and chicken manure as it is really hot. Potatoes grow great in it, but you have to be on top of the billing as they pop out of the ground easily.

Great Advice! Potatoes were grown in hard soil to help break it up

We are moving our garden this year (to a drier location). We don't have to really remedy the soil but, to get it started, I'm following the advice of a longtime nursery farmer. I have laid down a bunch of cardboard to kill the grass. On top I have laid bags of soil that I got on sale. This year I have cut open the bags and planted directly into them. Next year, I'll dump them out and till it all up. The grass will be good and dead by then. It has happened pretty fast so the area isn't as big as I'd like but I'll just repeat the method and expand next year.

Great idea, Fowler.

We had 3 dump truck loads of black dirt plus one of old manure delivered yesterday. We will leave the clay but I suppose a little will mix in once we till it up. We aren't getting an early start on this thing but at least we can say we did it!! We weren't expecting too much out of it this year anyways.

Mix your black dirt in and praise god for the clay on dry years as it will help hold moisture!! We have the opposite problem. We live on a sand pile and in the dry years I have to water like crazy so we built my garden in a lower area and last year I could not get into my garden to weed it until the end of July and I still had to use strips of plywood and would sink to my elbow when moving my board ahead! Good luck with the garden.

Forgot to add I have yet to plant my garden as hubby finally came home so he sprayed it and then will till it sometime this week.

That's right! I will be thankful for this sticky gooey mud It's amazing how different the soil can be within our area! No matter where we have lived, it has always been clay.