HELP!! I am living with my parents right now (I am 23, long story), and they built a house about 4 yrs ago. To make a long story short, I am taking over the patch of lawn next to the driveway, which is about 50 ft wide until it hits the forest that we are surrounded by (very pretty area.) The area I am talking about is as follows: a 3-4 ft section of grass right next to the driveway, with the remainder of the area as clay soil. I tried to use a pitch fork this morning to loosen it up, and to my surprise, there are a TON of rocks as well. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to improve on Clay Soil? Also, please keep in mind that I can not have a compost pile as of right now (long story as well...LOL) Thanks in advance for any help.

Build up, don't dig.

Order a few cubic yards of triple mix or topsoil, cover the ground with lots and lots of newspapers (at least 8 pages thick) and/or corrugated cardboard to keep the weeds down, and dump at least 4" of soil on top of them. Optional and pretty: build a low retaining wall with bricks, or some of those stones, if you do want to dig somewhere else. You will be able to plant in the imported topsoil immediately. The newspapers will decompose over the summer, and the clay soil underneath will be conditioned gradually into something you can sink a pitchfork into. It really works. I build my garden beds right on top of the sod in my back yard this way. I've never had a problem with the weeds beneath the newspaper. (Wet the newspaper before you spread it on the ground, or the slightest wind will blow it all over the place.) 3 cubic yards of dirt will give you approximately 4" of height on a 5X10 foot garden bed.

You may want to check out a book called "Lasagna Gardening". What I described above I like to call the "hasty lasagna". Lasagna gardening is a cute way to say "sheet composting".

You're going to hurt yourself if you dig into that clay, 23 or not, although mining out the rocks might be fun. Good luck, and happy gardening!

If this area borders on the edge of a forest, how much sunlight does it get? It would sure be a shame to jump through a bunch of hoops and then not have enough light to raise a garden. Which brings me to my next question - what are you wanting to grow? Shade plants? Vegetable garden?

We have mostly clay soil around here and it has been tremendously improved by the addition of alfalfa hay. I just layed it out on our garden about 8 - 10" thick and let it rot down. Kelp meal will also improve your soil. I've also worked in rabbit pellets (the alfalfa pellets rabbits eat) as a quick soil improver. It does take time to improve clay soil, but it can certainly be done. Good luck and happy growing!

Well the route we took involved lots of digging and a moderate expense for good black dirt (about 45 cu yds). It was tedious, hard, hot, but worth it. Our yard was ammended in 1 growing season from hard pan clay to beautiful dark loam. If we had the time we would have definitely tried other alternatives. Lasagna style sounds neat and probably more do-able in your situation, but hey, ya never know. Good Luck
Gr8tfulmom

When we moved into our nebraska housing unit the yard was hardpan clay underlaid with caliche from front to back. No worms, no perennial grasses, just annual weeds, and one sickly tree. We double dug with a jackhammer to break up the caliche, hauled in a bunch of dirt the first year to garden with, had indifferent results and the next year, you couldn't find where the improved dirt had been...it had been cooked by the weather conditions right back down to clay. Well, we were on a REALLY tight budget, with my MIL's surgery and all...so whatever I could do had to be for free. I found a local stable where I could get all the manure I could use, and a wood chip pile where I could haul away all the wood chips I could use. So that's what I did. I hauled manure and covered it with a thin layer of wood chips for a month...then we had a load of wood chips dumped on the lawn, and spread that out, so that the whole yard, from front to back was covered with about a foot of stuff, manure and wood chips. I went ahead and planted in that and had better results, but by the next year, the whole yard was teeming with worms, and had rich, black soil that you could grow ANYTHING in...our yard started to look like a jungle. In heavy clay, or sandy soil, wood chips, or other chunky organic matter, are one of the best things you can use to modify the soil. As they break down they form a spongy mass that has the perfect cation exchange rate, holding water and oxygen ready to be used by plants and helping to feed them and stabilize quick dissolving nutrients, too. Then you can add other ingredients to round out the nutrients.

If clover will grow, I'd put that in. Let it get real tall before you mow it. Or you could try a mix of clovers. They will build your soil for you while you watch.

When I first came here there had never been a garden. DH scraped of the turf and plowed upe the soil ( mostly clay and sand) I didn't plant much the first year.

Then I started hulling manuer from where ever I could get it. Every year since then I add more manuer. I now have soil that is ritch and dark.

This year I planted winter rye grass as a cover crop to keep the weeds down. And it worked!

Also you can put manuer on the hole where the plant is going, mix it with a little dirt water and then put the plant in. I use horse, cow, and rabbit manuer.
Just make sure it is composted well.

Feather

Keith Baldwin, a phD in soil science and an professor of soil science in North Carolina, wrote an article in Garden Gate a few years back about improving clay soils (specifically the red clay in North Carolina) and he said to add organic matter, lots. Start with 8 inches of whatever OM you can get and mix that in the top 8 inches of the soil.