Improving clay soil on the cheap

Thekla, One post, which had a lot of water in it buckled and broke when removing it.  
It was rusting almost all the way through.

Wow!  So much for galvanization preventing rust.  Who knew!

Corn is great for this. you probably wont get a good crop but youre growing your soil amendment & mulch rather than hauling it in.

Corn grows fast and makes a lot of roots. the roots arent deep but tbh its best to focus on the first few inches anyway.

add in some N fixers like peas/beans or leucaena if you have the climate.

Don't weed, don't worry about harvesting. Once the corn is done just trample it. Now you're ready to plant something else.

I have heavy clay soil. I do all of the above.

Every year rivers rise and fall. When they fall I take several 5 gallon buckets to a nearby river and harvest sandy river loam. Little by little the % of sandy loam increases in my garden.

Steve Farmer wrote:Corn is great for this. you probably wont get a good crop but youre growing your soil amendment & mulch rather than hauling it in.

Corn grows fast and makes a lot of roots. the roots arent deep but tbh its best to focus on the first few inches anyway.

add in some N fixers like peas/beans or leucaena if you have the climate.

Don't weed, don't worry about harvesting. Once the corn is done just trample it. Now you're ready to plant something else.

All grasses are amazing with their biomass abilities. Another excellent option would be to look at the cereal grains, which might be cheaper while giving tighter coverage. If you're really excited to add biomass, sorghum sudan is pretty much a giant of the annual grain-type grasses and a RUN-to cover crop when you need to add lots of biomass quickly. Of course, when cover cropping, the rule of thumb from experimentation seems to be aiming for 8 or more species. Think that's via Gabe Brown (don't quote me on that!). That's supposedly the magic number where things just pop and soil building is thrown into overdrive.

I often daydream of "grubbing up" my 2 acre "fruit savanna" section with a 2 month back hoe rental, putting in some wide and shallow swales, throwing down a dozen or so lbs of sulfur, 100lbs of sea-90, 200lbs kelp meal, then establishing a cover crop of yellow sweet clover, mammoth red clover, mixed sunflower, sorghum sudan, annual ryegrass, japanese buckwheat, purple top turnip, russian kale and tillage radish before it has a chance to compact into a sludgy mess that'll eat the boot right off your foot ............ maybe that all belongs in the "you know you're a permie" thread!

The real fun would be watching the chickens, ducks and turkeys have at it all come fall!  

"compact into a sludgy mess that'll eat the boot right off your foot"

ROFL!!!   Such a great description of what happens.   I walked out to the greenhouse yesterday, trying desperately to walk only on the river rock or trampled grasses.   Even so, when I got back to the house, I was walking on 'platform shoes' that were 2 inches taller than when I started.  Any loose grass just makes the mud into adobe.

I have 2 boot scrapers next to our back door that don't even begin to touch the sticky mess... they just compact it further.   So I have a stick next to the door that I can use to manually scrape it off the sole and into the crevices.

Toko Aakster wrote:
Congrats you've adopted several trillion individual life forms. They're your pets now, and they have a nifty side-effect of making plants grow real good.
Feed your babies.

I had to sign in just to give this post a thumbs up and to post this message of appreciation for Toko! That was both hilarious, encouraging and useful!
We have a pretty small clay-bound back yard. When we moved in my husband started off as a fiery convert to chop-and-drop and littered the raw clay with branches and wood. We still keep tripping over them. We've covered those in increasingly rotted straw (leftover from the house construction) and cardboard. I'm working on making beds for non-lawn groundcover plants (letting the local plants battle it out), adding a strip of compost and soil and clover seeds etc whenever I have a spare afternoon (not that often).
Right now we have ten puppies. We've chucked the soiled cardboard from their indoor bed into a corner of the garden, and now that we've moved the little furry things outdoors they'll keep fertilizing and nitrogenating the soil. Maybe they'll do us the favour of digging down to the clay layer and scratching it up a little. Once they move out next month we'll see how to deal with the next steps.

William Bronson wrote:I've seen ideas about  using  human hair in a similar way.

Has anyone tried dog fur? We get lots and I haven't found a way to make it useful yet. It's not especially fluffy, about 2-4 cm long and straight.

This is interesting.  I have a problem with thick yellow clay that sees Capillary Rise.   I recently replaced my chainlink fence and some of the posts had a lot of water in them. ...Now I will try sulfur inside the posts that contain water after a drought.


Dennis, on sulfur: it reacts with water to make sulfuric acid. I'm imagining that might eat through your posts faster than normal rust.
Also, when you folks scatter sulfur pellets where they'll get wet (I'm tempted to try myself), just get out again fast, don't inhale the gases (sulfuric acid in the lungs), and stay away for a bit. I don't know how much of a risk this is (how many pellets, how many litres of water, how big an area you need for the gas to dissipate) but just... treat it with caution.

Jeff Lawton talks about adding sulfur to your soil by building a worm bin and adding lots of cruciferous vegetation.
He says this way the worms eat the high sulfur material and produce great bioavailable sulfur for your garden plants to take up.

 In my garden the worms also do a nice job popping through the clay layers.   They move through the heavy clay and deposit sand in little pockets.   I can follow their trails and see where they have left sand.  They also do their usual work of leaving their castings on the surface.

Emilia Andersson wrote:

William Bronson wrote:I've seen ideas about  using  human hair in a similar way.

Has anyone tried dog fur? We get lots and I haven't found a way to make it useful yet. It's not especially fluffy, about 2-4 cm long and straight.

If it's clean, it's mostly the same as using feather meal as a soil amendment. I throw clots of dog and cat fur in the worm bin, along with my own beard trimmings and hair from hair cuts. Just be very sure you're not using hair and fur with chemical contaminants (toxic flea treatments and hair dyes, for instance). Like human hair, though, ANYTHING toxic in the animal's diet tends to end up in fur. Think of human hair tests for illegal drugs, where lab workers can easily detect that one time you ate a roll with poppy seeds 5 years ago ;)

I quit tilling and started using raised beds a few years ago to combat the clay.  I've hauled sandy loam from the river, decayed crumbly wood from our forest and lots of leaves to build up the soil.  I also add compost but seldom have enough for all the beds.  This year I have a cleared area that will eventually be the spot for my greenhouse.  While I hope to get the greenhouse up this year, the area around around it will eventually become part of the nearby garden and I'm planning to grow mangel beets and daikon radishes to help break up the soil.  I know the radishes will succumb to the cold, but not so sure about the beets as occasionally I have one overwinter and produce seed.  My goal is to let them decay and probably do it again next year.  I've also bought some alfalfa seed with intentions of growing it in an unproductive bed and cutting it for mulch a few times during the season.  Of course everything is experimental but at the least I should get some organic matter into the soil.

We've been without a truck for a few years now and  have hauled everything with our SUV.  No luck with chipdrop so we grab every bucket and tote that will fit in our vehicle and load chips into them.  We also have a hitch hauler that increases our carrying capacity by about 33%.  In 2021 we just happened to be in town the day one of the big box stores marked organic garden soil down to $2 a bag and we bought everything they had.  We guesstimated 3 to 4 trips to get it all home and it just happened that there was a U-haul place nearby with a pickup available.  We were able to haul everything in one trip for approximately the same price as we would have spent in gas making multiple trips.  I've had good luck with that soil but wouldn't likely do it again as there's too many stories about contaminated soil and compost nowadays and I actually bought a suspected bag of contaminated Black Kow manure the previous year.  I've been gathering chicken manure from my neighbor as I know what she feeds them and what she uses for bedding,  otherwise I bring no manure  in and rely on comfrey and compost tea for an extra boost.

Emilia Andersson wrote:

William Bronson wrote:I've seen ideas about  using  human hair in a similar way.

Has anyone tried dog fur? We get lots and I haven't found a way to make it useful yet. It's not especially fluffy, about 2-4 cm long and straight.

Just let it go outside, the birds will love it go nest building material. If you have bird feeders there are even things sold to hold the fur for the birds to collect it from.

Michelle Heath wrote: No luck with chipdrop

I had no luck with chipdrop, either.   Living in a rural area, I don't think these types of services are very available.   But we bought a heavy duty chipper.  We split our own wood, so there's always a huge pile of bark  - mostly from conifer trees.  I chip these into a 3-sided bin' we made from plywood that is about 4' x 8' x 4' (tall) . Out of last year's bark, it's over 1/2 full.     I know bark isn't the best chip material, but it's still organic material. I wish our chipper were also a shredder, so I could shred up smaller, live branches.  Our chipper clogs up on those.

Clay is so super slippery and gooey that walking out into the yard is a real problem, so I spread wood chips on the paths.   I'm assuming that eventually the paths will become less gooey.... maybe I'll even end up using those as planting places and make new paths

We have a lot of clay here in MS; one reason I am so fond of wicking beds XD

With clay, the "lasagna" technique works well; use a lot of wet cardboard as the bottom layer and plant into the top; anything you like.  An instant environment for worms is created and they will help move cardboard down and clay up, with a lot of aerating tunnels, all at the same time that you are happily planting on the top.

One serious move though, not to make - never walk or step on it. You can damage the good work being done below; you can also slip and fall if the clay with cardboard on top is wet.  Ask how I know...

My solution...

Being in the foothills of the Carolina's, orange (clay) stained everything is daily life,   We have been on our current property for 2 years and I have tested a variety of the different techniques listed.  The best solution by far that would seem to meet your criteria is a layered woodchip/leaf system.  

Cost = $ 0.00 (I contact local tree services and they are happy to drop their chips on my farm) (The town is also happy to drop their leaves at the farm when they do the town pick up 2x's a year)

Time = Very little since I use a tractor to flatten layers.

Start with a 12 inch layer of woodchips  then a 6 inch (pre-compressed layer of leaves)
If you have chickens, ruminants or pigs throw their manure on top of the leaf layer before the chips.
Repeat 3xs making sure that the top layer is woodchips... Leaves fly all over the place when it gets windy (trust me I made this stupid mistake)
Leave it alone for 6 months.  

Depending on your environment you may need to wet the layers once a month.  Since we live in the land of rain we are fortunate to not have to.

After 6 months if your environment/climate is like mine you will have black compost and worms everywhere.  

Loretta Liefveld wrote:I had no luck with chipdrop, either. Living in a rural area, I don't think these types of services are very available. But we bought a heavy duty chipper.

I have had the same experience. I'm not sure whether ChipDrop is ever particularly good over here but none of the UK alternatives (I'm mostly thinking of the ArbTalk forum) have ever worked for me either. Everyone wants their own woodchip or they sell it to big biomass energy providers. I have seen some of the local community gardens getting drops from the local council so that might be an option for some...

Loretta, I'd love to know more about the chipper you bought? Would you consider posting about it in another thread?

Betsy Carraway wrote:
With clay, the "lasagna" technique works well; use a lot of wet cardboard as the bottom layer and plant into the top; anything you like.  An instant environment for worms is created and they will help move cardboard down and clay up, with a lot of aerating tunnels, all at the same time that you are happily planting on the top.

I agree entirely with this. We have patches of heavy clay soil and just putting cardboard onto the ground, weighed down so it doesn't blow away, improves the soil structure drastically. It suppresses the grass (although not the docks or sorrels, hardy weeds as they are) and, as you say, the worms love it. I've added woodchip over the cardboard to make paths, and compost over several layers of cardboard to make extremely productive beds. Next year I'm going to dig into the clay a bit to see how the structure has changed over the past 12 months.

I can find glean large quantities of cardboard from local businesses so it seems like the best option for us. Most businesses will gladly give you their packaging as, in the UK at least, they have to pay to recycle it. I only accept the packaging that is mostly plain as I am suspicious of the inks and glues used in some boxes.

Make sure to remove all tape from cardboard. Previous owners here mulched with cardboard but didn’t remove tape and more than a decade later I am still pulling tape out of the ground.

Luke Mitchell wrote:

Loretta, I'd love to know more about the chipper you bought? Would you consider posting about it in another thread?

I found a thread "All about Wood Chips" and someone was asking about recommendation for a chipper, so I responded to that thread (since I have no idea how to actually START a new thread).   Here's my response:  Wood Chipper response

I've never shared a post in a thread before.... hope I did it right.

Andrea Locke wrote:Make sure to remove all tape from cardboard. Previous owners here mulched with cardboard but didn’t remove tape and more than a decade later I am still pulling tape out of the ground.

This is more important than anyone realizes when they first start doing it. Made the same mistake and after 10 years of this, I still find odd bits while out working a bed. Nothing irks me more than the sound of plastic crinkling as I turn soil over looking for potatoes!

I would like to add another question here. I have tons of wood chips and clay soil. The problem I like to solve is the water retention of the soil. For that is it better to mix the wood chips with chicken manure and make compost or should I make charcoal out of the wood chips. In short, what holds water more, compost or charcoal?
Thanks in advance.

Vase Angjeleski wrote:I would like to add another question here. I have tons of wood chips and clay soil. The problem I like to solve is the water retention of the soil. For that is it better to mix the wood chips with chicken manure and make compost or should I make charcoal out of the wood chips. In short, what holds water more, compost or charcoal?
Thanks in advance.

Definitely compost, no question in my mind


Also, a huge aspect of keeping clay soil moist is keeping it covered. Clay can actually hold a ton of water, but it starts to dry out and crack on the surface, and because of the huge capillarity of clay, dries out deep fast. I'd honestly just dump chips on top of the soil. They'll break down over time and migrate into the soil, but protecting the soil surface from drying out is huge.

Would the wood chips work good for cover? Or cardboard maybe?

Wood chips are an excellent cover for soil!

Vase Angjeleski wrote:I would like to add another question here. I have tons of wood chips and clay soil. The problem I like to solve is the water retention of the soil. For that is it better to mix the wood chips with chicken manure and make compost or should I make charcoal out of the wood chips. In short, what holds water more, compost or charcoal?
Thanks in advance.

To quote one of my favorites in the space, always sure to make you laugh:
"Just throw it directly on the ground!"
-- David the Good

Biochar is great stuff, but when comparing its ability to hold water and nutrients to clay, it's way more work than necessary. Clay is an EXCELLENT base for a good topsoil.

And adding organic matter to the mineral soil (clay) is how you build topsoil. Mulching helps to keep the soil more moist and moderates the temperatures, making it habitable for all the micro-livestock we should focus MOST of our efforts on when trying to achieve rich, "chocolate cake" topsoil.

So do like the quote says and just throw it directly on the ground. What could be easier?

If you have corrugated cardboard with all tape and stickers removed, it’s fine to lay it down before you throw the wood chips directly on the ground, but no need to consider it necessary.

Cardboard adds diversity to the food stock available for fungi, microbes, all our friends beneath the surface.

In many circumstances composting cardboard is  preferable to energy intensive industrialized recycling.  Too many variables to choose an absolute best practice on what to do with cardboard, and so many good things to do with it.


When I put cardboard down before the wood chips it will kill bindweed, or cut way back on it for a couple years, allowing me an opportunity to weed the remainders.  Sometimes we want to suppress some plants, foxtail, puncture vine, burr clover...  If there’s nothing I am trying to suppress, I take a pitchfork or digging fork and poke through the chips to puncture the cardboard.  In my mind, I am increasing gas exchange, increasing water penetration into the soil, allowing pathways for migration of organisms from below to above and back again, so that they can find optimum conditions.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:

When I put cardboard down before the wood chips it will kill bindweed, or cut way back on it for a couple years

Wow!  So good to know!  I have 2 garden areas that have so much bindweed.   I've been trying to eradicate it for several years... but as you most likely know, the roots *can* go down a couple of feet sometimes, and they are very fragile, so they break off when trying to dig them out.   The best I've been able to do is to go out weekly or twice weekly to try to dig them out.   I will definitely try cardboard over them.

Yeah! It works a charm.

You need to be able to cover a large area, because the roots are not necessarily straight down from where the plants are this year.  

And when it has worked best for me, I used several layers of cardboard, with the seams very definitely not aligned… so that poor plant would have to send that stem a loooooong way to get through a layer, then another loooong way trying to find the next crack.  I left the whole thing in place through 2 growing seasons.  I didn’t water or anything.  Another good thing was, the wood chip mulch minimum 6 inch depth makes a fine inoffensive surface.

I think I heard somewhere, and I believe that bind weed has a big water storage root.  And being a perennial, it also has a store of “food” underground.  My strategies when trying to get the bindweed into good neighbor status instead of dominating the region all are about trying to get the plant to deplete its resources.  

Good luck!

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Yeah! It works a charm.

You need to be able to cover a large area, because the roots are not necessarily straight down from where the plants are this year.  

Hmm...  I can probably do that in the veggie garden, but the other place that it's absolutely rampant is a 'meadow' garden.... I've planted all kinds of meadow flowers..... and of course the place that it's most prevalent just has to be right where the majority of the flowers are.

Well, I might just have to sacrifice that garden for a year or two.   Leave the perennials in and cardboard around them.  I'm pretty desperate at this point.

thanks for the tip.

(Sorry for hijacking this thread on clay soil)

How about Perlite and Vermiculite? Anyone any experience with it?

I minimize my use of mined materials, and both of these are mined, heated to transform them into their commercial state, then transported multiple times, and packaged in plastic bags.

I am sure they will suit some folks’ projects.  I used perlite to insulate strategic places in my first rocket stove, but don’t use them in my soil.

I think as a soil amendment, they are going to prove expensive, and not make much of a contribution to fertility.

Tristan Vitali wrote:
- surface application only with the sulfur "buttons", and not too thickly.

Dandelions have just started blooming!  Yesterday it got up to 85, so I'm guessing it's time to put sulfur down.  

Two questions, though:
1.  We're supposed to start having a week of rain starting mid-week next week.   Should I still put the sulfur down now?  Or should I wait until the rain is over?

2.  I'm a little worried about whether my chicken will think those little yellow buttons are something good to eat.   When I put some granular fertilizer down in my daffodil bed, they started eating it all up!    I have to assume it would be poisonous for them.    Thoughts?   Do I need to be sure to fence them out of the area for a month?

Plant turnips and clover for a winter cover crop, the disc and disc. each yr plant again

Steve Lepley wrote:Plant turnips and clover for a winter cover crop, the disc and disc. each yr plant again

I like this idea, and if  you plant turnips or mangel beets (a huge variety) and daikon (tillage) radishes each year for a few years along with alfalfa for one year, you won’t need to disc or till.

Would that take you in the direction of your ultimate goal?

The root vegetables penetrate the soil, feed the soil food web.  Some varieties of alfalfa have VERY deep roots, which feed the soil food web as deep as they are able to penetrate.

You could do some strategic grazing or mowing.   The changes would be lasting, and after a few years of radish beet turnip, you could probably go to perennial deep rooted highly palatable grasses, which would continue to deepen your layer of improved soil, and provide even more forage for grazers.  If what you are wanting to do is grow rows of annual vegetables, leave rows in between the rows of soil improvement plant community.  They will feed your row crops.

Loretta Liefveld wrote:

Tristan Vitali wrote:
- surface application only with the sulfur "buttons", and not too thickly.

Dandelions have just started blooming!  Yesterday it got up to 85, so I'm guessing it's time to put sulfur down.  

Two questions, though:
1.  We're supposed to start having a week of rain starting mid-week next week.   Should I still put the sulfur down now?  Or should I wait until the rain is over?

2.  I'm a little worried about whether my chicken will think those little yellow buttons are something good to eat.   When I put some granular fertilizer down in my daffodil bed, they started eating it all up!    I have to assume it would be poisonous for them.    Thoughts?   Do I need to be sure to fence them out of the area for a month?

A little rain is no big deal, but you don't want it washing into gulleys and low spots either, so if it's a heavy rain I'd wait. And yes, chickens will probably try to eat it. They're not too bright sometimes about things like that. Not sure if it would be poisonous, but pure sulfur can't be good for them to be eating. Fencing is probably smart

I don’t have time to read all the posts so I might be repeating someone else’s advice. My soil (laughing) is almost solid clay. Even after days of rain a broadfork will only get a couple of inches into the top and the area has been untouched forest for the last 60 years. We tried sand which was most definitely unhelpful and hay and manure and clippings and leaves and the only real success was wood chips. We saw a tree service truck working on a residential street and stopped and talked with them. They work locally but are based in the biggest city near us so they were happy to unload their trucks locally after filling them with wood chips. In fact, we now have a veritable mountain of wood chips so keep that in mind when you ask for chips. We have the space so it’s not a problem. Now we provide chips and fire wood to lots of families so it’s a double blessing.

Anyway, someone mentioned that you can’t germinate seeds in wood chips and I wouldn’t try because you probably couldn’t keep them damp consistently but you can plant seedlings into wood chips and let them root through the chips and into the clay as long as you provide consistent moisture and nutrients to them until they can extract their own. I did an experiment just this spring to test this and it worked really well. Since I was watering every day anyway I even stuck a broken branch from a pepper plant in the chips and it survived long enough to grow roots as well. After a year of being covered with 10-12 inches of chips, clay becomes soft, crumbly and wonderfully fertile so, even if your clay isn’t going to be very workable right this instant, if you put down chips now you could probably get a decent fall garden crop out of your clay soil this year and next spring should be the abundance you’re looking for.

We've taken down about 90 diseased pine and sweet gum trees on our 1-acre suburban lot in Athens, Georgia (talk about dense red clay)...on the mucho mucho cheap...so we've got logs lying around everywhere and huge stumps rotting down. It's so humid here, things are actually decomposing pretty quickly, and all kinds of things are growing up now that there is some sun. When I make my morning rounds every morning, I pull up hundreds of pine and sweet gum seedlings plus any particularly crappy grass that's trying to grow, but I've been leaving the annual bluegrass and most of the weeds. My partner is afraid to go out into the back yard because he says it looks "so snakey." Yeah, I expect there are tons of snakes back there; I'm just hoping the huge black rat snakes who are enjoying the new habitat are eating any copperheads that might venture into the yard. I try to be careful when I'm walking around.

Lots of birds are taking up residence here and crapping all over the place, so that's got to be good, right? ;-)

One thing I've been letting run wild is maypops (Passiflora incarnata), which come up wild and want to cover everything. My big crop this year will be maypops, so I've got to find something good to make with them. I pull the little sprigs that come up in the pathways and drop them, but I'm letting some of the vines scramble over the logs. The solitary bees are filling the logs full of holes now that I've peeled off the rotting bark, and I have never seen so many happy bees in my life!

I'm encouraged that I have lots of worms now and that, in areas where I've layered cardboard and bags of leaves, the soil underneath is starting to get more friable. I have lots of fungi...lots of stinkhorn surprises, the phallic kind and the brain-coral kind! I'm just letting everything pretty much do their thing, just being sure to knock down anything that's to the flowering/seeding stage that I don't want to proliferate too much. I've read those maypops can be invasive, so I'm a bit nervous about that, but you can't beat them for a lot of biomass and fruit. The bees are absolutely all over the flowers all the time.

I also bought a ten-pound bag of white Dutch clover seed, and every time it rains, I go out and scatter some more in among the other rampant growth and stretches of bare ground. I've got large patches coming up now all over, and I'm hoping eventually it will outcompete a lot of the other weeds.

As far as planting is concerned, I've been trying to put in guilds with the usual perennial suspects, and about half of what I've planted has died because the soil and pH are probably not to their liking. So I'm going to force myself not to buy anymore trees this fall but focus instead on nurturing the life that's happening on its own pretty much without me, then adding wood chips when I can and neighbors' leaves and such, chopping and dropping, fermenting comfrey tea, studying what's doing well to try to get clues about what else I can plant that might do well. I do have a small fenced area with raised beds that the deer can't get to with tomatoes and some other veggies planted, but it'll be a while before I get that soil in better shape.

I've got to find out what maypops like and see what else will like that same thing. Because, wow, do I ever have maypops!

I think one factor in how best to deal with clay soil is that not all clay soil is alike. So maybe those who say "don't add sand" are right, for their soil...for mine, I say DO ADD SAND. Mostly I base this on my experience. Over a decade ago, I added sand to a small patch of clay soil, in hopes of getting some decent carrots. I don't remember how the carrots did; what i remember is the next spring coming on a patch of lovely soft soil and then remembering--Oh yeah, this is where I put sand last year! So I dd more of it. We do have a pickup, and nearly every year I ask my husband to fetch me a load of sand. I've also read that the idea that "clay and sand is the recipe for bricks' is a myth. However, some sites say you need builder's sand and not playground sand--I think this means you want coarse sand. And I think another key is that you should always add lots of organic matter as well as the sand. I do use my car to haul bags of leaves every fall and winter--I clean up our mile-long lane both to avoid a nice tilth in the road and to haul home the leaves, chop them, put them in wire bins, and one year later I have leafmold. I even use my car to haul goat manure, since I am not a decent, self-respecting person. To turn heavy clay into decent soil quickly, I advocate adding all the organic matter and sand you can (as well as some wood ashes or sulfur if you need to adjust the pH), and turning it in. Use a tiller the first time, especially if it's a large area. I have permanent beds I don't till anymore but I do turn them all once a year with a shovel,. If the soil is heavy, in need of much amendment I  turn it first, dump the organic matter and sand on top, then turn it again to halfway work in the amendments. If the forthcoming crop needs a fine seedbed, I then work the whole bed with my hands. For potatoes I don't bother; for things like cabbages and tomatoes, i just work the planting spots. I've been gardening here for 14 years now and my beds have gotten pretty good. They don't all need sand every year but I try to give every bed an inch of some form of organic matter every year. I have one patch that's flat, not raised beds. This is where i grow corn and sorghum, which do better in flat ground--and I rotate my tomatoes and squash in there some years to keep down the squash bugs and tomato blights respectively. I try to get a cover crop in there in the fall, usually winter rye and hairy vetch. That's a good way to improve your soil over winter, but I often have trouble getting the crop to take if the food crop comes out to late. Like the tomatoes and sorghum I have in there this year; I let tomatoes go till it frosts, which in recent years hasn't been until November, and the sorghum comes out when the guy with the mill says it's time, usually early October. Last year I managed to get a good cover crop without tilling; I had  corn, and mulched between the rows with cardboard I got int town from hardware stores that sell big appliances and furniture, Some manurey hay went on top. In September as I was beginning to harvest the corn, i pulled up all the cardboard, scattered the rye and vetch seed, and tried to rake it in. Spots that were to hard, I dropped compost or hay or whatever i could find onto--and I watered it twice, trying not to step on the germinating cover crop (also trying to avoid that while harvesting the rest of the corn. Mostly I pulled the cornstalks this February, when the cover crop was well established and didn't mind. So I'll try doing that again this fall, but it may not work in the tomato section. I find cover cropping the most advanced of gardening methods, I'm still learning how to make it work.

I agree. Don't use sand. It turns into concrete. I've tried it.  What you can do is to add gravel. If you live near a town, get on Craig's list and find out who is giving away free gravel.  Even if you buy it from a big box store it can be helpful.  However, you still need to add the organic material. It just makes sure that your soil will no longer drown during wet weather, so all of the healthy microbes can survive, and your soil will be aerobic instead of stinky and anaerobic.  Now you're breeding the good microbes.    I only add gravel when I am planting a new plant.  I mix it into the soil.  The plants do really well in it.  If you are planting a woody plant, like a tree or a shrub, put some old, rotten wood in there, too.  It's kind of like mini-hugulkultur.  Elaine Ingham and Redhawk talk about how the woody plants need more fungally based soils.  If you plant a diverse garden, the leaves will fall off in the fall.  They will add diversity and turn into soil.  Worms will get to work.  I have been doing biochar now for years and that has helped a lot too.  Yes, defintely gather leaves in the autumn.  With leaves and wood chips we have turned amazingly terrible compacted clay into good soil over the years.  

John S
PDX OR

Hi, for Diane Kistner:  Maypop (passiflora Incarnata, or just "passiflora") is safe and popular herbal throughout Europe, Central and South America, and maybe more; it is commonly used as an extract, tea, or in capsules, for anxiety issues, insomnia, and even babies' colic.  It is not only quite effective and lacking in any side effects, but safe at any dose, even for babies.  So you may wish to collect the mature Summer leaves, before fruit formation, and dry them in shade for use as tea or powdered.  Might make a nice gift as well!

The fruits contain a small amount of sour pulp, and a lot of seeds; this is edible.  You wait, as with the tropical passionfruit, until the fruit is dry looking and wrinkled, before using a scissors or sharp knife to cut it open and slurp the contents.  Maypop lacks the "Hawaiian Punch" flavor of the its more famous tropical relative; but many people have made it into jellies, etc.  One fruit will yield only a tablespoon or less, so you need a bunch.

One other leaf that is good to collect and dry right now (Summer, before the fruits develop) is the wild persimmon.  The leaves are very high in vitamin C and make a lovely, subtle tea.  The flavor is slightly green, slightly acidic, and nice though mild.  You could boost the vitamin C content with pine needles or pine tips (collected in early spring); and also add flavoring ingredients like orange peel and spice, for a humdinger of a Christmas gift; throw it all, dried and mixed, into a mason jar or into individual tea sachets in a container.  Add a ribbon and you're done.  Nice with honey in the middle of Winter XD