In article
,
Davej wrote:

I have a heavy clay soil and have been rototilling ever since I was a
kid, but now I wonder how that fits in with modern "no-till" ideas. I
did create a small trial plot where I applied a huge amount of mulch,
and it creates a dilemma, because you still get the weeds but you also
have a lot of earthworms that rototilling would chop up. It is not
practical to hand work large areas with a fork unless that is all you
ever want to do in your life, so I wonder what practical methods are
used? Thanks.

I have TERRIBLE clay - not really soil, you can literally throw pots
with it.

Years ago, I tried "double-digging" it - the whole dig up a row, fill
with compost, put the soil back on top back-breaking toil. In very
short time, no trace that that had ever been done. So, years ago, I
admitted that "fixing" the "soil" was a hopeless task. I now treat it
more-or-less as an urban garden on concrete or a rooftop would - I pile
horse manure (ideally well-composted, some years are more ideal than
others) wherever I want a garden bed, and plant in it. Blueberries are
the sole exception - them, I pile all the pine needles available around.

I have lots of worms. In theory the worms would be making holes (I
suppose they must) and mixing things into the clay (no sign of that
within an inch or two of the compost/clay interface, which is not hard
to find even years later - the stuff is _hopeless_.)

I was just doing some bed-rearranging and setting up melon/squash beds,
where I went down the the clay interface (piling the compost on another
bed), broke the top of the clay up with a "garden claw" hand tool that I
find works on it about as fast as the tiller, with less hassle (the
tiller keeps claying-up and needs to be scraped clean), and laid a 12"
layer of not very aged horse manure on the clay, which gets followed up
with the compost that's been there for a while longer and is pretending
to be "soil" in my garden. I figure squash are always happiest growing
in the compost heap, so why not give them what they want?

The clay was its usual unaffected self - concrete-like when dry, slimy
when wet, not resembling anything you'd want in a garden at all, ever.
This is perhaps 10-12 years on in this part of the garden. It might be a
bit browner for an inch - below that it's the usual gray color. It's had
compost and lime (even some gypsum and greensand) flung at it for a
decade or more, and it doesn't care.

For my garden and purposes, hauled-in horse manure is the only reason I
can grow anything - locally-produced compost makes up a trivial part of
my overall, vast, compost use.

In any case, I rarely if ever till the beds. I also don't walk on them.
Most weeds pull right out quite easily, as they have not got themselves
rooted down in to the awful clay, and the uncompacted compost has not
got the holding power that the clay does.

If I cared to spend money on it (I don't) I might try adding (ON TOP of
the horse manure) a large amount of sand (and mix that with more horse
manure) but I can haul horse manure for the price of gas and my time
shovelling, while sand costs me real money. Plus, many sources claim
that it's too easy to get worse concrete-like "soil" when adding sand to
clay (rather than vice versa) though I have talked with someone who did
it (mixed with an equal amount of manure at time of application) and has
had a few years of success with that. I've done a small amount on a
single bed to get carrots to pretend to be happy a few times.

My horse manure is non-Eliot-Coleman-approved - normal stuff bedded with
wood shavings/chips since straw costs MORE than hay around here, and
I've only ever seen straw bedding right around the time there was a
newborn colt at the farm I usually haul from. Straw is nice, but it
ain't happening without someone spending a lot of extra money. While not
ideal, this works anyway, and if given adequate time (too often I can't
manage that either, at the rate I go through it - other than, it gets
there in place on the garden, eventually) it breaks down into perfectly
nice material.

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