Clay Soil Ammendment - Oregon Coast Range Food Garden Journal

Hello clay soil builders!  Here's a garden project I am becoming increasingly wound up in, just in case anyone can use a quick newbie crash course for making some heavy clay soil more useful in the area.

The Oregon Coast Range is pretty much all timberland.  The soil is generally poor off the valley floors because of the repeated clear cutting, steep grades, and rain.   Organic matter tends not to accumulate in the hills under the torrents of rain once the trees are cut down here.  So fight the clearcut, get out and find yourself thinned timber to purchase or invest in some hemp fiberboard or hempcrete or whatnot.  I have far off plans for a hempcrete wofati.  

We are really into some very poor soil here.  Compressed anaerobic clay that dries into a hardpan, save the half inch wide and much deeper cracks that appear in high summer as the stuff dries out and contracts over months.


Note the bit of the good stuff, those dark things that are 2 or 3 year old decayed wood chip mulch.  The grey stuff is more fit to have a bit of grog or fine sand added to it and be used for making ceramics, than it is to be used as a planting medium.  

Here you can see the variance of top soil types encountered in something like 800 ft^2


There's a piece of long dead and dark oak on the left.  Much of that stuff on the ground here can be easily pulled to pieces with just your fingers.  Often the stuff is black as charcoal, despite not having been subjected to any high heat. Something about a blue flame or being burnt by the foxfire. Or we can say that its colonized with many of the microorganism you want in your soil, just like the dark fluffy compost.  The fresher more solid hunks of wood aren't as immediately nourishing to plants as that decayed-soft wood or finished compost, but it will give up it's goodness in time.

The one lightly colored clod actually crumbled When I dropped it on the deck.   It's got crumble!  Unfortunately, most of the area to be developed was about 1" to compacted heavy red or grey clay subsoil.

My understanding (what the dude at my local forest products company told me) is that color is usually good.  Those chalky yellow and orange mineral deposits and shades of rust on the grey clay likely means you have plenty of sulfur and iron (just as areas can have their growth and yield limited by to little of a trace mineral they can have their growth limited by too much.)   Here you can see some of the subsoil mineral deposits streaking with the shovel stroke, like shooting stars!


I am not sure what purple and bluish hues indicate but it's likely a good sign for the presence of some useful trace minerals.  Got Cobalt?

testing 1 2 3 testing can I has pictures

I included as part of the mix, river sand.  All the colors of the rainbow!  Though there's not a lot of green and blue hue.  I might have just been sold some crap at $20 a yard because I trusted the guy, but he said the stuff would loosen up clay for roots when used in the proper amounts and slowly give up dozens of trace elements that plants need for decades (copper, manganese, zinc and cobalt apparently, etc) but it won't correct any immediate deficiency.  


However accurate that circle of elemental uptake interference from 'Hand on Agronomy' is (don't forget a dash of Molybdenum?) I think we need some bone and wood.  


The sand helps keep the clay from fusing back to itself while you are tossing it with the shovel anyways.

When those 15+ kg clods can be turned over on the ground and not go to any pieces there is some serious work cut out for you.  It would probably have been much less time investment and only a few hundred dollars to just buy more compost and leave this stuff out of it, but I was determined to use the native soil.

These beds are not as good as the large hugelculture bed, but they worked pretty well.  The less needy kinds of the 3 b's (berries, brassicas, beans) can do very well in somewhat acidic clay soils.  When I began this last Spring, I had not found these forums or gotten the wealth of information that 'permaculture' will make available.  Here went a first attempt that put out decently, and the inputs included $20 for sand and $22 for finished compost, about $30 for a bit of fertilizer and green sand, about 60 hours of shovel and wheel burrow work, ~160 dollars for the drip line irrigation (+installation time...), then a few hundred for the new fence (+installation time...)  What makes it all worth it is that it will all be just as or more useful next year, and requires no additional work for some years.  And I'll be able to get the next bunch of fencing in much quicker.


Digging out a small trench. Dump some of that old soft rotten wood and duff into the bottom, then get your pile of forest duff ready (organic matter on the left) and top the clay dirt you dug out with some sand or something else that is non sticky and non toxic.


Give it a few shovels of finished compost and then top it with lots of aged forest duff or just a lot of compost if you have it.  The darker and more aged the forest duff, the more immediately useful it will be.  A lot of the stuff I used was from the previous fall and wasn't going to be very useful for any immediate planting.  It will however, be a serious boost to a soil with so little organic matter content.


Then jab jab jab jab jab jab jab, turn over turn over turn over, repeat till you sweating and the arms ache, or until you have a meal something like this to shovel back into the trench.  

Do it for like 60 hours, with all the duff collecting (accumulated organic matter) top with compost or mulch to hinder rain compression.  I also topped the beds with about 20lbs of green sand and 10 lbs of some mild 5 5 5 fertilizer.    It was really just a dusting for good measure I guess.



Put up a fence, but in some drip lines, and plant some things and watch them Grow! And take a picture with the less quality camera.




Tomatoes and squash and a few carrots did decently, but not as well as what was planted in the raised beds of "nature's best" planting soil (~2/3 the size and half the yield from a tomato plant.)  Beans, kale and cabbage were almost the same size in some places of the native soil beds as they were in the purchased planting soil.  The seed started peach trees kersploded with growth when set into this soil mix and given the actual ground.    

All those wild weeds grew giant versions of themselves in the beds.  Edibles I let have space near the beds include Dandelion (tasty flowers but mostly bitter leaves here...) Cat's Ear (bitter flowers but young leaves that cook as well as spinach) and the wild herbs and seasonins, Plantain, mustard, ox eye daisy, English daisy, All Heal (or Prunella), Yellow Rocket, Creeping Charley, Chickweed, Henbit, and only one plant each of lamb's quarters, Shepard's Purse, and Wild Turnip.   And all those thistles.  I didn't get to eat any of the last three, but I went through buckets (mostly making broths) of the other very edible greens and flowers that seeded and grew of their own accord on this patch of ground and get devoured by the deer if not growing behind a fence.    Oxalis adds a nice lemony tangy note to salads, and Bull Thistle can make up the majority of what goes into some great vegetable broth.  Scissor it into a large pot with a few carrots and some allium n' salt n' seasnons, boil it for twenty minutes, give it a minute with an immersion blender, and then boil another twenty, then let it cool, strain, and you got yourself the first ingredient of some mighty fine soup.  I ended up filling up most of an 8 gallon pot twice, and then freezing the stuff in about ~6 C bricks. I realized that wild growth broth making season is about finished when summer arrives here.  Get it while it's free!  

There was also some not so edible appearances, including a lot of hawksbeard (supposedly edible but these ones were extremely bitter) and a few dogsbane (smells so gross) bittersweet nightshade and broadleaf dock.   Even nutmeg is toxic if you eat enough of it.

The next soon to be fenced in, former compressed clay, one-inch-to-the-subsoil hillside, that will become home to some fluffy and tasty stuff.

Stacking that old wood in the dead of winter for a more legitimate hugelbed.



The budding wood pile that would become the base of the larger upper bed.


Premade funhouses for soil life.

Dry snow white surface, slimy tubes, and some kind of rust-orange egg-looking things on decade old oak.


The accidental Fawn Lilly transplant got moved with its nursery log.


The after math of some organic matter mining.  Free nursery log! Funny, the only part of the thing that I couldn't get the shovel through was the very bottom.  I thought that part touching the ground is what rots first, not last.  

Here you can see the ducks keeping pretty despite their shallow and generally mud brown bath, a first attempt at holding some water that is changing. It has since had the liner removed and been pounded with a a 6" diameter piece of oak that was pounded with a sledgehammer.  It holds some water without the plastic.  You can also see the lines I had started to dig for the upper retaining walls to sit on.  The lowest bed photographed here had been constructed just like the large lower bed, with rotten-soft wood tightly stacked in a long line about 3 feet tall in the middle, spottily covered with some manures and composts and bones and shtuff, and then topped with poor clay topsoil at this stage. Also a few buckets of smelly sludge from the duck bath.  Also, the beds were being regularly whizzed on by whom you are currently reading.



The digging and moving was all done by hand, so the layout was set to the already present contour to minimize the amount of digging necessary.   It was only a bit more fugly with the exposed earth before I started tearing up that poor hillside that first wasn't treated properly when it had it's fir trees removed and was planted with English Ivy (years before I was born) and was treated poorly again after the mat of English Ivy was removed and then given the Monsanto treatment after the grass didn't take.   It's doing much better now.



Dirts have been dug, earthworms have been cut in two and crushed unfortunately, and rocks have rolled.  Also, woodpiles in the background and others not photographed getting machete-ed to 1-2 foot long bits, piled tightly, and buried along the far forest's edge.  A lot of blackberry vines that were most of an inch in diameter at their thick end also went into that far bed.  A little further along, looking lower.

Ready and loaded for the season with something like a land sigil.  3 and 4 year old peach trees were planted at the near and far ends of the large lower bed, another was planted at the far end of the large upper bed, and my only apple tree a few feet tall was planted at the far end of the short bed.   All got different seed mixes that included at least a tap rooter and a nitrogen fixer.


And onward from mid April to the summer solstice.  The large upper bed had much better ground cover, most of the left side of it that is dry-grass-mulched in the photo was as green as the rest of it, but then I let the ducks go at it with the idea that they would eat some bugs that had been eating some but not a whole lot of the greens, but instead the ducks mostly sat on their ass and ate greens.  So much for the bug hunt.  I let them have at the komatatsu, chard, and red skinned daikon bred for it's greens.  The 3 ducks had in about 3 days decimated too much of the bed, so they aren't allowed anymore.  There was plenty of lettuce for them to chow on, but apparently ducks are more into Asian greens.



The upper wall's more steady water-guiding gradient seen from below.  Stacking rocks is awesome.  Some snakes moved in.

I began making the fat stack of old soft wood in a ring around the oak tree, trying to settle the bed's high ridge along the boundary of the leafless oak's will-be canopy.  I then swerved away from the oak tree when a few logs rolled down the hill and I understood that a bit of digging and a small retaining wall would sit much better there than a pile of wood.


Here a few weeks later, the newer small bed is dug out and given its dose of old wood with peat moss and many other things growing on and in it, the rock is placed, and the much larger bed was topped mostly with what was dug out to create a flat stretch for the smaller bed, mostly rain eroded and compressed clay that still managed a few earthworms in the shallow roots. Also, the first fence post I cut and peeled myself leaning against a tree in the background.  Looking pretty ugly in winter as a work in progress;


The smaller bed was filled with some prime grade dark red powdery nursery log dig out, then a few cups of stinky manure fertilizer, and lastly topped with a few cm of purchased planting soil before having a seed mix of lettuce, fennel, purple radish, carraway, ha gobo, Pack hoi, carrot, celery and clover scattered on it. The lower larger bed was topped with a more significant depth (4-6", a little under 2 yards of total volume) of finished mint compost and Nature's best planting soil, and was seeded 3 weeks later with Egyptian spinach, radish, chard, leeks, squash, an heirloom shell bean, mung beans, hemp and flaxseed.  Here all those seeds are still being hid from the little wrens or sparrows, blue jays, and ducks, all of whom seem to go for the mung bean sprouts most of all.  I haven't seen the robins in the beds as of yet, and there are robins about.  There are also some snap peas, peach trees, raspberries, red flowering currant and all manner of weeds about.  

I just want to say how impressive your garden preparation is John. Any chance of an update?
I'd not come across that "circle of elemental uptake interference from 'Hand on Agronomy'" before - I'll have to look that up.

What a beautiful yard.  

I also love seeing all those organic material improving that clay soil.

Lovely.

That’s what we have here in Hawaii it’s a real struggle to grow a lot of food .find a place with dark sandy rich soil are look for were there’s good soil somewhere on your property.lots of biochar helps and dolimite .