Overcoming a difficult growing environment.

Hi folks!  I usually spend my time over in the energy forums but I have a matter to share with those of you more experienced than myself in gardening.
I am in zone 6B.  Ohio.
My lot consists of heavy clay that is not well drained.  Much of the spring and fall will see large pools of standing water.  By the time things dry out in summer, the ground is a pattern of cracks from the clay shrinkage.  I tried to overcome this by adopting the Back to Eden method, which did provide amazing results for my soil quality, however, I am plagued by two things that make BTE unsustainable going forward.

Cottonwood seeds and some sort of viny weed that permeates my lawn.

The cottonwood seeds germinate by their hundreds of thousands as the wood chips offer up unlimited opportunities for them to gain a woody foothold.  I find them impossible to keep up with.

The viny weed threads its way over, under and through the chips, making it impossible to eradicate as any bit of it left in the mulch will go right back to work infiltrating everything.

My hope is that I could do raised beds in a hugelculture sort of way.  I would like to put some dead wood and compost in the bottom of a 24 inch tall raised bed.  I would then fill it with soil tailored for the plant type about 4 inches shy of the top of the bed.  My next step would be to cover the soil with some weed barrier (geotextile) and cut holes for seeds or starter plants.  Then I would cover the top with a layer of fine mulch.

My hope is that the viny weed will never climb high enough to reach the beds and that the inevitable cottonwood seedlings can more easily be plucked out and discarded along with the mulch their roots will hold on to. The mulch can easily be replaced.

Do you think this will work?

Tough call you have to make there.
Is it time to bring in the cavalry in the form of goats to eradicate the weeds.
I am not familiar with those two, but they sound like pioneer plants and maybe used to help get organic material into the soil,
even though they are a nuisance at the start of the process.
If you grow green manure to turn over into the soil, would it outgrow your 2 weeds?
I googled Vinyl Weed and found this;
"Weeding vinyl is the process of removing the unwanted vinyl from your cut design. "
haha, thats confusing its a sign writers term!

It's hard to build good soil when it's underwater a lot of the time, and dead dry the rest. All you will get are colonizing plants that can stand the extremes. Is it possible to improve seasonal drainage to stabilize your moisture situation?

I've found comfrey provides a good barrier against invasives that send underground shoots or trailing vines. It makes a thick wall - both overground and underground - can be chopped  several times in the season for  very nutrient-rich mulch, pollinators love the flowers, it supposedly makes good chicken fodder, and can be used as a medicinal herb. Just make sure to get a sterile cultivar to avoid getting a third invasive.

I use mine to keep my neighbour's ground elder at bay and while some wheeding is still necessary, the comfrey makes it possible to have a somewhat stable situation.

Also, there's wood chips and wood chips... I've had my best results building up my heavy clay soil with mulches that were either partially pre-composted, or in a form that decomposes fast. This is the opposite of what most people want in mulch, but I find that slow-decomposing mulches end up invaded by weeds, whereas quick-decomposing ones allow you to continuously top with new mulch.

Over the years, I've used whatever I could find, from free coffee grounds to shredded leaves, commercial bags of cocoa shells, compost, chop&drop material, etc. Ramial chipped wood (or BRF) is awesome, especially if slightly pre-composted and inoculated with mycorrhizae. Wood chips from larger branches and cedar mulch were far less effective at soil building.

As you may have seen in my other post, I now have to start over from scratch in my front yard, so I'm trying to get a first crack at the clay with daikon radishes. To be followed...

Ah yes, I agree, there is so much that can be done with clay.

Still, if the topography or ground water puts you underwater for substantial periods of time, it's tough to do anything useful.

The first step, to my mind, is to consider how to manage these seasonal floods. My 2c.

For the Back to Eden Method, what did you use to cover the soil?  Straw, wood chips, cardboard, all of them or  something else?

If not wood chips, I would use 6" to 12" of wood chips.

Do you compost? If not, this is my suggestion.  Coffee grounds, leaves, etc.

I feel it would help to identify that weedy vine in order to get rid of it.  Can you post pictures?

My first thought was it is pachysandra, though I haven't had problems getting rid of the ones we had.

Are you able to get a compact tractor in there to do a "rip" also called sub-soil?

I have some very clay soil in an area I decided to garden, and used my tractor with a single shank ripper around 20" deep to pull out a large rock layer (they were acting like dams under the surface making water stand). It also manipulated the clay enough to then cover the area in some leaf compost that I bought ( I don't have a large enough supply of homeade yet) and other organic material to top it, namely a partially decomposted hay bale along with wood chips in the paths.

I'm not saying that it's prime conditions this first year...some crops did pretty good but others seemed small and shrt lived. The idea is to get the permeation of water air and organic matter as deep as possible to get things going in the right direction. Weeds are still a definite issue, but thier roots in the soil are helping the process, and I pull/chop and drop as much as I can. It's better than it was is all I can say, and should continue to get better, so don't give up hope!

As far as your weed problem, if anything like mine it just takes a fair amount of handwork, layering heavy mulch, and even like you said - planting into landscape fabric...I would NOT cover the landscape fabric with additional mulch, that way you can remove and move around the fabric from time to time...new weed seeds will just get into any mulch on top and frind a way to grow...but they would be easier to pull/control if you must since they would have difficulty deep rooting, but they will penetrate the fabric eventually one way or another from what I have seen and make a mess of things if it's left in a single place too long.

To answer some questions about my particular situation, I laid down a layer of cardboard and buried it in about 9 to 12 inches of wood chips.  After a few years they did a nice job of conditioning the soil, and I replaced the chips from time to time, but as I mentioned before, the chips offer too much potential to these two weeds.  The cottonwood seedlings are fairly resilient and must be removed from their moisture source or they will soldier on.  The purpose for the wood chips/mulch on top of the geotextile in the raised beds is to allow the rain water through, protect the soil from direct sun, and provide a disposable, compostable medium for when those pesky cottonwood seeds come knocking.
The geotextile will prevent cottonwood seedling roots from seizing any appreciable purchase on the soil, making them more difficult to pull out.

The height of the raised bed prevents the viny thing (I will try to get a picture of it and identify the species) from getting into the beds.  The stuff pervades my entire lawn.  I'm told it's everywhere in this area.  Once in the wood chips on the ground there is almost no amount of labor that is sufficient to eliminate every single rhysome from starting its invasion anew.

Better drainage isn't an option.  There is no place for it to go.  There is no place on Earth much flatter than NW Ohio.

It's Ground Ivy.
Ground Ivy (Creeping Charlie)