Growing food in hard clay
unprepared.life
unprepared.life
As a farmer, my advice would be:
#1 Analyze you soil for profile, pH, organic matter and macronutrients. Show the results to a professional and ask for advice. Most lab analyses parameters will stand for a couple of years, so it pays off. Besides, doing the wrong thing once can ruin you soil for decades.
#2 Look around. Is the problem uniform for a wide area or is it just you? Are there any water sources or creeks nearby? Cattle grazing? Is there a history you can check?
#3 Choose your crops having in mind the resources you have. Maybe you soil is terrible for a given crop and quite good for another. Maybe you should just let it be, or maybe not.
#4 Don't go online before speaking to a professional. Avoid guru-based farming/gardening, and be skeptical as a rule of thumb. This applies to my own advice as well.
I know a garden isn't a farm. But still, it's about doing things right and achieving results rationally, isn't it?
The author improved her clay soil dramatically over a 3 year period. My notes:
* Add a layer of organic matter. 3-6 inches and work it in. Manure can work its way in on its own
* heavily mulch in the fall
* form soil into raised beds to help with drainage
* Aeration. Broad fork or digging fork.
* Clay busting plants: plant Daikon or plants with very strong tap roots, but fibrous roots can help as well
* Don't leave soil exposed.This is all standard stuff. For anyone else who wants to learn about gardening, I suggest listing to Gardener's Question Time every week: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qp2f/episodes/downloads
He wanted to plant bushes, rented a motorized post-hole auger. A 4' tall auger with a motor and frame mounted on top, you start the motor which sounds like a bomb going off and with your brother on one side and you on the other, wrestle the thing into the ground, the auger twisting and snarling like an angry animal.
After getting through the foot of imported soil it began to bang and shake. I shut the motor off, said "We must have hit a water pipe!"
He laughed. No, we'd just got to the hardpan layer. It sounded exactly like banging a hammer into an old iron pipe.
Eventually we broke a hole through and even drilled another foot or so after that (the hardpan was just a couple of inches thick).
Ultimately it was futile: all the rain (what there is in CA) would run across the hardpan and drain through the holes we drilled that day. The bushes would sink through the holes, leaving the property looking like some Mad Hatter had placed tipsy plants at random angles.
So a little clay? Count yourself lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliche
Most of the approaches that fall short of what "Elizabeth" ended up having to do will utterly fail in the case of "caliche". As wikipedia notes:
> Caliche beds can cause problems for agriculture. First, an impermeable caliche layer prevents water from draining properly, which can keep roots from getting enough oxygen. Salts can also build up in the soil due to the lack of drainage. Both of these situations are detrimental to plant growth. Second, the impermeable nature of caliche beds prevents plant roots from penetrating the bed, which limits the supply of nutrients, water, and space so they cannot develop normally. Third, caliche beds can also cause the surrounding soil to be basic. The basic soil, along with calcium carbonate from the caliche, can prevent plants from getting enough nutrients, especially iron. An iron deficiency makes the youngest leaves turn yellow. Soil saturation above the caliche bed can make the condition worse.
Some things I've done for veg gardens:
Some raised beds built with locust wood -- relatively cheap in my area and lasts forever outdoors. They're about 2ft deep and dirt and compost on top of about 1ft of logs. We are repeating this process in a larger garden without raising the beds. We're basically using what we have to produce something like Hügelkultur[0]. One of our advantages is that we have tons of rotting wood and grasses, we plan to use that as much as possible to produce soil that works well for annual veg.
To prep the ground we plowed with a rotary plow to invert the sod. The grass had 6 months to decompose then we harrowed -- tilling but no soil inversion. Essentially tines sink into the ground and rotate on a plate parallel to the ground. In some of the hardest areas we used a sub-soiler attached to a 2-wheel tractor, which creates a disturbance beneath the hard pan so that roots can get in.
A few years ago we did a big garden directly in straw bales -- I can't remember exactly the details. It was cool because you could grow stuff all over the sides too. The downside was that it's pretty expensive to set up and it's torn down every year.
We planted a bunch of apple trees. For that we used an auger attached to a sub-compact tractor to get holes. This was pretty rough with the rocks and clay especially because the auger does not have reverse. Which meant that every time it got stuck we had to disassemble it, drill a 2x4 into the side and spit it out by hand. Once we had the holes we put a mix of dirt, lime, compost. The trees seem to be doing great.
Our main thing is willow trees which don't seem to mind the clay at all. But getting them in the ground required a rotary hammer drill.
While planting trees was absolutely the best choice, you could have avoided most of the physical efforts, the auger and the disassembly, by just planting younger trees. Most trees develop their full strength after a year. You can grow them from seeds, wait a year or two, then delicately plant them with a mix of clay and compost in a small hole. You would have traded physical efforts for patience, but trees fare better when they are not transplanted.
Also, roots grow thicker and stronger in compacted soil (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-5696-7_...) this often leads to a better anchorage.
It is quite possible that another variety of fruit tree produces better results when growing from trees, but I don't know. I only know the apple bit because my father tried starting an apple orchard before his health started deteriorating.
So you start with strong, healthy, local seeds, let them grow a bit, and graft the kind you want to eat after 3 years. Same thing for cherries, pears, peaches, and others.
This is also used for growing grapes in France and about everywhere in the world : roots and trunks are east american because of their resilience to a particularly nasty pest, but the right variety of grape is grafted on it. So we still use the original variety to make wine ! That’s also why almost every vineyard is at most 200 years old, despite the fact that wine was already there under the earliest roman empire.
At the time, it was important to me that I engineer a solution that didn't involve bringing in tons of outside material. I tried _everything_. Broadforking, adding homemade compost, growing daikon, growing every type of cover crop imaginable, tilling, not tilling, fertilizing, not fertilizing.
The problem is that all of my cover crops were so nutrient-starved, they could never really grow strong roots. What ultimately fixed it was a combination of homemade compost, commercial compost, and wood chips. In retrospect, I could have saved myself so much heartache just by spending a few grand on compost, spreading it several inches thick, and growing cover crops for a few years. But I was stubborn and impatient-- Bad qualities in a gardener, I suppose.
(On the plus side, I've gotten really good at making huge amounts of compost!)
https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/bioreactor/...
I make around 2 cubic meters of compost per year from household and yard waste. I get a lot of gratification from it. I also keep a worm bin which generates maybe 10kg of castings per year and a bunch of tea. I use it to feed my vegetable garden and green house which are pretty small but productive.
Some day I’d love to have the space to scale up and make more compost and grow more food with it.
The version that I've seen used in clay soil involves burying logs and split firewood in the clay and then building up a raised bed on top using finer and finer materials as you work your way up.
This is why "add sand to improve drainage" is often such terrible advice. People picture sandy soil that drains well, but by adding sand you're usually dragging the soil mix distribution towards the finer end and will make it worse.
The “improve the ground” is a very important part of subsistence and sustainable farming. Reducing the outside inputs as much as possible while still improving the soil is a laudable goal.
But tilling it at the beginning to create ideal starting conditions for such a no-till approach is allowable and encouraged.
It’s amazing how much damage people do to their lawns by consistently over-mowing.
As a new homeowner, I'm curious: what would you define to be "over-mowing"?
That is, mowing even if the grass doesn't need it. For example, the lawn service comes once a week, always on the same day.
It's also going to depend on your mower. Is it push electric, push gas, or ride gas? The more power you have the longer you can let it grow. And the longer you can let it grow - within neighborly reason - the better.
I like to cut at maximum height on the typical homeowner mower, or at most one notch below, and every two weeks or less. Spring is the only time when I end up cutting every week due to peak growth rate.
I don't bother with herbicides but add fertilizer once a year. There is a lot of weeds that don't belong but as long as they are cut they don't bother me. I also like the dandelion colors in the grass, and the kids like the fluffball seeds. If you are not OK with weeds you'll have your work cut out for you - there will be an order of magnitude more steps involved.
Some grasses will never grow to maximum height of most mowers, as a general rule, cut it so that you're leaving more than enough of the grass uncut that its still getting good ground coverage and there the 'lawn' is not being destroyed during the mowing process.
The first time I mowed, it had been growing for about 4 months. I ended up cutting close to three feet of grass and cut it down to about 6 inches -- my mower's max height. The next week I cut it to two inches. Then with winter it didn't really grow for another three months or so. Now I'll cut it to four inches and it's a foot long in two weeks.
I've got five acres and about four of it is lawn with another acre of trees. I've got a strong powerful mower. Weeds don't bother me as much as taking four hours to mow. I knew it would take a while though and I'm perfectly fine with letting the grass grow long for three or four weeks between mowings. But finding how much cutting is too much will take a while for me.
I would let it grow all year, and never mow, if it weren't for the pests that attracts. Neighbors don't bother me. In fact, neighbors are interested in leasing for their cattle. That's the great part of having so much land. But I'd rather not step on cow pies ;) I'd be more interested in letting someone grow crops for a quarter of the year. I don't have time to do that myself.
You might be able to partner with a local school or scout troop to organize a community garden, or an educational garden.
This was on a small scale < 100m^2 and frankly without at least some good soil from the outside it is a long, uphill battle to grow plants in it.
They still burn the rice fields like morons every autumn, despite the dense clay here… I tried mentioning how even Cambodia prohibited burning and uses enzymes and got blank stares.
It basically immediately turns it into a productive patch of land that plants can thrive in. This is not novel a gardening technique.
What is "this" ? The article ended with a list of 9 things that apepar to have worked.
> I till about top 6 inches of soil, amend it with a mixture of compost, chicken manure, cow manure, green matter/waste, peat moss and a little sand in case of clay.
"Elizabeth", in TFA, did the same, but noted that the plants could not grow roots into the hardpan layer below the mixture. I suspect the same was likely true of your effort.
...[0]
> Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture based on pseudo-scientific and esoteric concepts ... emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.
They did that in the early 1920s. Do you have any sources for the alternative biodynamic agriculture you're describing, especially the use of that term to describe them?
If you're interested in when gypsum will and (most likely) won't work for you, read this article. It's based on actual science and brings receipts.