On 7/21/2017 11:56 AM, songbird wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
songbird wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
...
Hoping this fall that we will be able to take all the homemade "dirt" in
the raised beds and mix in a lot more composted cow manure plus all the
stuff from the composter. I intend to rent a small cement mixer and use
that to mix up all the goodies and then back into the beds. Beats trying
to rock a tarp back and forth with our old arms and shoulders to get a
good mix. Need to add another bale of peat moss too.

just put it down on top and it will get mixed in
when you plant new things in and if your worms are
working...
No worms here, in five years I've found two worms and I suspect they
came in pots dear wife had bought. Remember, we have two inches of sand
on top of several feet of gumbo clay.

earthworms will live in clay, it's the composting
worms (red wrigglers and others) that might not do
well with the heat.
In all my life all I've ever found in solid gumbo clay are fire ants.
Crawfish will go through a small layer of clay but never through five
feet of the stuff. I've tried to get earthworms to work here but they
will only stay in the raised beds. Fire ants will drill down in clay but
I never see any on the top of the soil with a few exceptions.

The builders of this community came in, checked the level of land and
hauled in many tons of Houston gumbo clay, red, white, yellow, and a dun
color. We live on what used to be an ancient ocean probably a million
years ago and not to far from the Gulf of Mexico. On top of the clay
they put in a few inches of sand, laid down San Augustine grass with a
little bit of dirt on the roots and called it a lawn.

Every year I use a hand held seed spreader filed with ground gypsum and
go other the front and back yards and the edges along the side of the
house. Gypsum, over a period of time, will start turning gumbo clay into
a little dirt. We do that here and we did that in Corpus Christi, TX
back in the early eighties, where we had the same problem. Learned that
from the folks who had been living there for years.

George