Soil compaction can happen for many reasons. The first step is to know your soil, and not jump right into solutions for a problem we don't fully understand.
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.
Due to the pandemic, the amount of gardeners has increased substantially. So, this type of info is making a resurgence on YouTube in the form of instructional videos and elsewhere as blogs.
Brother's property in Cupertino CA was built on hardpan. This is clay baked by 1000 summers into pottery. The builder brought in dirt and spread it over the hardpan to make the lot look attractive.
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.
Ha! This is exactly the state of my yard in nearby Mountain View. I did a huge amount of digging with a pickaxe to break the clay, and succeeded at making sinkholes with bushes in the center.
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.
Sow bugs seemed to be able to turn over some of the caliche soil in my yard. Drip irrigation worked to keep native plants happy enough to break up more dirt. But I never got to the point of trying food crops.
Most permaculture systems that start with hard areas start with native grasses and things that grow large roots. The roots help break up whatever is there. Swales for water catching, not letting run off. Then usually after a few years you can start to plant things you like to eat. Drip irrigation is decent for bootstrapping. Most of these systems usually do not see real results for about 20 years in the real hard areas with little rain and rocky soil. If they pick an area that used to have that plant life it can be as few as 3-5 years. I may have went down a large rabbit hole a few weeks ago on YT :)
Recently bought land for farming, all the soil is pretty compacted clay and full of limestone. I've tried a lot of things to change or avoid certain soil conditions. But for one thing it gets a lot easier when you're planting trees and perennials that don't mind the soil you have.
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.
> 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.
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.
Apple trees are not good candidates for starting from seed - not if you want to eat the apples afterwards. Most apple trees are started from cuttings (cloning!). Otherwise, you might just wind up with apples that aren't good for much but cider (the alcoholic sort). Johnny Appleseed, a figure from American history that has been mythologized, realistically went around spreading apples for alcohol. This is the same reason folks could "find" or own a prized apple tree: The apples tasted delicious.
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.
Apple trees _are_ good candidates for starting from seeds. Especially because the kind you eat often have poor adaptability to a fresh, harsh, environment.
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.
It varies based on the plant. The phrase you're looking for is called 'true to seed.'. For some plants it's odds of 1:100,000 and for others it varies an order of magnitude in either direction. Don't try growing avocados from seed either. You'll get some disgusting fruit, most probably, in this little genetic lottery after 5-10 years. You can buy presorted seeds that'll grow good fruit, but they're awfully expensive and take roughly a decade to grow. Most fruit trees are just grown via cloning/grafting.
Jeez here i thought i knew a lot about gardening / ag. I would never have guessed nature worked that way! That said i wouldn’t mind a few apple trees for cider myself.
I really don't know that much either. I just took up a little bit of gardening last year. I just learned all of that from a few short videos on YouTube. I'm sure we'll both learn more given time. Best of luck.
I built a big garden on a top of an unused part of my property out here in Southwest Oregon. When I started, it was nothing but rocks and hardpan.
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!)
Making compost is a great skill in my book. I have no idea if there are better ways to do it, but this bio reactor design or something similar is something I’d like to try if I ever had the space:
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.
For terrible clay soils, there is a German gardening technique called Hügelkultur that also involves adding organic matter, but in much larger chunks that will slowly break down over time.
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.
I live in a region where the ancient topsoil is under about 100 feet of clay that was deposited during a massive flood event 10,000 years ago. I tried for decades to amend the soil by tilling in huge amounts of organic material to no avail. It had no affect. Eventually I ran across an explanation that it is impossible to change the structure of clay soil in that way. Clay soil is made up of extremely fine soil particles. The tiny particles don’t become bigger by adding organic material. Even if every single tiny particle was completely surrounded by organic material (an impossible feat), the original particles would still be tiny. They would fall through the larger organic material like water passing through and clump back together. As the organic material decomposes, the tiny particles will clump back together. Eventually you are right back where you started.
It's really hard to get to a workable particle size distribution when starting with silt or clay, for sure.
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.
my grandparents said just grow turnip... Japanese ones where it's thick and long (Daikon) and just let it um rot, after couple of seasons you'd get the length worth of top soil that's good for rice at least!
I just gave up on vegetables in hard clay and planted peach, pear, persimmon, apple and pomegranate trees that are bearing now. When I first planted them, I collected the top soil into 2 ft mounds and planted the trees in that. Besides that, I have a bunch of blackberries and raspberries that grow well in clay. Currant too apparently but I haven’t tried it.
One thing that works for me is putting a layer of corrigated cardboard (make sure it's recyleable) down on top of the soil before heaping compost onto it. This gives the compost layer lots of time to develop into a healthy soil with the first crops you put there, and crucially for worms to get going eating the compost, eating the cardboard and starting to churn up the soil. The cardboard keeps the hard layer damp for long periods softening the upper part of it.
This is the lasagne method of no till gardening, which is also fantastic at smothering weeds. Ultimately this did nothing to break up the authors clay bed.
Yeah. I had super hard clay when I bought my previous residence. Like, it was difficult to break with anything other than a pickaxe. For me, all it took was not mowing it for a year, and the previous bald spots became jungle-like, and earthworm-laden. I did mulch one of them, but not the others.
It’s amazing how much damage people do to their lawns by consistently over-mowing.
Not OP. IMO mowing too short is the worst, especially if not mowing frequently, i.e. going from very long to too short. It removes sun protection, dries out the plant, and removes the green parts that generate food going into the rhizome.
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.
Just a heads up for anyone following along, some countries mowers "max height" is significantly different than other countries "max height".
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.
No damn HOAs telling me what I can't do and nobody to blame for problems except for myself. Pure heaven and with gigabit-fiber internet! Awwww yissss :)
This is the way. One could call it "sysadmin lawn care". Pure constructive laziness. Plus, we have way more birds and other animals than other "traditional" yards nearby.
Not sure there's a technical definition but I would say it mowing too frequently.
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.
True, but as most catchy names go, this one is a bit more nuanced than it might seem. No-till gardening (and no-till farming) is not about *never* tilling the ground. It's about escaping from a regular yearly or biannual cycle of tilling, which tends to deplete nutrients, biological activity, and moisture from the soil. In general, the goal of "no-till" (and the real world results in some cases) is soil that gets *more* productive over time instead of less, while simultaneously decreasing or alleviating the need for fertilizers and other soil amendments.
But tilling it at the beginning to create ideal starting conditions for such a no-till approach is allowable and encouraged.
No-till is about preserving existing soil. If the ground you have is nearly impenetrable clay, the motivation to no-till doesn't exist. You can't lose what isn't there. There's nothing at all wrong with stirring up a bed of clay in order to develop soil and integrate organic matter, aerate, etc.
The key to it all is soil improvement - and determining how that is going to be done. I guess the moral is she tried the simple basic ways that didn’t involve much change but had to resort to imported gypsum and machinery.
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.
I have tried to bury kitchen scraps, dead plants and any woody material (old wood, carton paper, dried and chipped Arundo). All of this does help earthworms to multiply.
The change in soil structure was noticeable after deep digging, removing stones and planting potatoes and cover crops (phacelia and rye). Cover the surface with mulch / dead plants material otherwise the sun will bake it to brick-like thing.
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.
The gypsum could actually have helped. Calcium cations can displace both sodium and magnesium ones on the clay particles. Calcium being physically larger can help create greater separation between clay particles which is helpful for building aggregates.
Ya, here in the lower Mondego river delta it’s clay AND calcium concentrations that make water filters die in short order. They do rice here.
I can’t imagine gypsum helping anything here.
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.
Additions like gypsum work in cases like this because they add permanent drainage to the soil. Adding organic matter also adds drainage, but microbial activity removes it over time and you end up with the same soil that you started with.
Maybe its just my inner caveman peaking out but this feels like a problem begging for the liberal application of high explosives to de-compact the clay.
Compaction doesn't stop the moment we loosen the soil. I'd say that it needs a liberal application of compost after your explosion, to let the critters and fungus penetrate deep.
I've done this a dozen or more times now. I end up with a barren patch of dirt/clay that nothing grows in. 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.
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.
> Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture based on pseudo-scientific and esoteric concepts ... emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.
This is really sloppy. Traditional biodynamic agriculture has hundreds of years of history and does not have spiritual or mystical perspectives but is largely focused around preparations of what is usually called "compost tea" which in this article is called "fetid swamp water" and is associated with JADAM instead because acronyms are scientific or something. Apparently some kooks decided to take over the term and others decided to yield it to them.
> Apparently some kooks decided to take over the term and others decided to yield it to them
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?
Yes, this is more complicated than my experience had revealed. My references came from Chinese immigrants. Their main "biodynamic" practice might be an odd translation of a Chinese term. Mostly that involves using compost teas which is extremely non radical as soaking vegetation and then using the soak water to help grow plants is basically just a mechanically assisted equivalent of rain transferring nutrients from topsoil.
I feel like a lot of the biodynamics people (especially wine producers?) have a vested interest in selling it as "organic plus" and skip over the whole "horoscopes for grapes" part until you really dig
I see the gypsum misinformation continues to thrive in the gardening world. Please keep in mind while reading articles like this that this world is absolutely riddled with old wive's tales, misinformation and muddled correlations.
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.
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?