Gardening is clay soil isn’t as nasty as you might think. Yes it takes distribute of work to boost it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the facility to retain moisture and distribute of nutriments that other soils can’t. The disadvantage is that clay doesn’t drain well and has pour aeration. This could 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 understand it’s traits. 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 facility to keep hold of or absorb positive charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to prosper from. This process is called cation and is what makes clay a comparatively fruitful soil, unlike sand which isn’t negatively charged and can’t keep hold of or absorb the necessary nutriments and moisture required for most plants to survive.
Improving the composition of clay soil is the only real way to enhance it to make it more easily workable. You’ll need to know the proportion of clay, silt and sand of the soil to correctly do this. Soil with more than a forty percent clay partials is often categorized as clay soil. To find out what the proportion 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 samples of the various areas separately.To collect a good correct sample that represents your garden you need to pick an area and scrape away about the 1st in. of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden trowel about 6 inches deep. After you dig the hole take a slice 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’re sampling more than one area.
Then the sample should be sieved and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and split any clumps. Let the sample totally dry for a day or 2. Once the sample is totally dry you’ll need to sift the roots and little stone out of the sample and breakup any lumps of soil. You can use a wire mesh or maybe an old colander.
Once you have sieved the sample the next step is to take the sifted 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 dilute all the sample. Check and make sure that there isn’t any material stuck to the jar. It should only take a pair minutes of shaking to get the sample diluted. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You will start noticing the sample to start separating within an hour however it wont be absolutely settled out for no less than 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 uppermost 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 p.c. for each layer. For example if the full amount of the sample in the jar is 4 inches high and the top clay layer is 2 inches you take the 2 inches of clay and divide it by the 4 in total height to get the p.c. for that layer. 2″ divided by 4″ equals .5 which is 50% clay.
A good loam or topsoil should have no more than 27 % clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the % of clay is high in your soil the best way to change it is with organic material. 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 material should be worked into the soil as deep as it’s easy to get it. After you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn’t a single job. You must keep adding organic material into the soil in the autumn when you finish gardening for the season. In the fall a planting of a green dung will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with further compost to add more organic material to the soil. Click here : http://makeagarden.com/garden-tools-2 and top gardening books for more information.