"Anne Jackson" wrote in message
The message from "chris lowe" contains these words:

Hi everyone,
We've moved into a house with what used to be a nice 2 tier garden, alas
the
previous owner was a bit of an idiot and dug out the top tier - about 3ft
of
topsoil was disposed of - so he could have a flat lawn. Now we're left
with
the underlying clay rubbish which is compacted and sticky and impossible
to
dig / rake etc. As he dug out 3ft of earth the garden is now so low down
it
hardly gets any sun and doesn't drain which has made the clay even worse
and
even the grass has stopped growing and moss has appeared in its place!

My question is, Is there anything we can do like adding sand etc to the
clay
to make it more habitable for plants, even veggies, as at the moment it
just
looks awful!

Any help would be most appreciated as I don't fancy moving 10tons of
topsoil
back in!!!

When we moved into this house, 39 years ago, the garden was pure clay.

The first two bits that became workable were the area around the
children's
sandpit and the place where we kept the metal bin that held the ashes we
removed from the coal fire...over the years we have spent a lot of time
digging in manure, spent compost, leaf mould, and any other material that
we could lay our hands on. I even used to sweep the pavement and put all
the grit that I swept up onto the garden...If you want to, you can spend
40 years making yourself a workable garden, or you can acquire some
topsoil...
the the choice, ultimately, is yours!

A good number people have answered this and suggested bringing in topsoil
when clay can be very successfully dealt with by some hard work. It isn't
easy but then neither is any form of gardening.

I've now simply got to ask. What about environmental issues?

It seems to me that environmental issues don't seem to a strong interest
within this group given the amount of advice I see to nuke something before
trying an organic approach to solve the problem, and bringing in topsoil is
another example of this approach. Topsoil has to be brought from somewhere
to the detriment of the location it's coming from, just as do all the other
things like sand and most manures etc.

How concerned about the environment are British gardeners and how does that
concern manifest itself?