Hey, good morning, it's Jason again here at Fraser Valley Rose farm, and I wanted to talk today about clay and heavy soil
I'm talking about amending soil and what I'll discuss here could probably be apply it across a wide range of soils, but
Heavy soil is what I have. So heavy soil is basically what I'm going to talk about
I made a video maybe a year ago on how to do the Jar test to figure out what your proportions of the
minerals components in your soil are whether they're
Sand silt or clay and from that test you can determine what actual soil you have and that's a great test and I really do
suggest you do it but it's just for your information because you probably already know you have heavy soil and
the
Question that follows that is what do I do about it? That's the that's the main thing you'll want to know
so today I'm going to go through some samples of soil from my garden that I've
Amended over time some less, some more
I'll show you how it that affects it over time, especially what the wood chips do to it
I'll show you some amendments that you can do to make your soil a little better for a wider range of plants
Okay, I'll try to keep a steady hand as I show you these samples from my garden this first one here
This is the top end and this is the bottom end is
basically my unimproved soil you can see from the
The way that the Spade cut through it it kind of is smooth. And yeah, you know, that's heavy
It's got a clay content that's probably just shy of classifying it a clay soil
But I haven't added anything to this on a regular basis. The only thing I've left is the crop residue at the top there
So you can see there's a little bit of organic matter at the top. But basically this is the unimproved condition of my soil and
yeah, it's
very firm
comes in big chunks, so
That's a heavy soil
the next one here, I
have improved by adding wood chips and wood chips over the course of
Just about five years now so you can see on the top end here
those are the almost uncomposted at the top here from below that you have a
slightly more crumbly
slightly more
Darker and
a better structure and if you go to the bottom of the sample
Even though it is still like my native soil over here. It is a slightly darker color and
I think from top to bottom
It's going to improve over time
Here's a third sample and I'm cheating on this one - going back in time. This was actually improved by the previous owner rather
Unintentionally this sample was taken from right around the barn. They had horses here and
I've continued to amend it with woodchips that you can see at the top here
but you can also see that up and down the whole length of the
depth of this
It is much improved very crumbly
In fact, if you look at these ones here, they held their shape of the Spade as they came out this one here
crumbled when it came off of my shovel and you
Can see that there are still chunks here that are clayish. So it comes from the same mother material comes from the same
From the same soil but over time those pieces have become
Less common within the profile of the soil and its overall it's improved by quite a lot and that's so this one
here's with the addition of
wood chips over the course of say five years to the top end this one is an unknown period of time but adding
wood chips from me and
Animal compost or animal manure from from the previous owners of the property
Alright before I go into detail on some of the amendments in ways that I improve soil in my yard
I just wanted to warn you off of one of them, or maybe not warn you off
But at least give you the full details
Which is a lot of people recommend when dealing with heavy soil to amend with gypsum
Or I guess it's a calcium sulfate and unless you've done a soil test unless you know
This is gonna help you. I wouldn't recommend it. There's some good articles online. I'll link them below the video here
To show that in most cases unless you've done the soil test
It's not going to help you with this kind of situation
We're talking in case you have sodic soil, then it can help but in most situations
Gypsum is not going to help you out
All right, let's go through some of the amendments here
And the first one I want to talk about a little more in depth is the wood chips now I get these from local
Landscape companies you can use a service like Chip Drop or something like that
Where they can arrange to have chips brought out to you
I just have a local landscaper here who dropped off a whole bunch and they do so
Willingly because it's a great way for them to get rid of the wood chips
Some of the alleged downsides of using wood chips I've heard from people is that it robs nitrogen from the soil
that hasn't been my experience or at least I haven't noticed any major deficiencies or different needs between
Areas where I've chipped it and have not
So take that with a grain of salt
I'm sure somebody can debunk that more thoroughly
The other ones I've heard is that they either harbors pests like insects and slugs and again in my experience
it hasn't made a major difference in the garden a
second one you can obviously go to are things like finished compost like I have here, but obviously
Animal manure is fine, leaf mold
Any kind of organic matter you want to add will definitely improve the condition of your soil over the length of time
the third one I talked about in another video was wood ash and these little chunks of
charcoal that the unburned bits from your wood stove
Can actually improve the condition of your soil dramatically over a length of time it helps to condition the soil plus it's a fertilizer
And it's the powdery stuff adds a lot of fertility to the soil. This last thing I wanted to point out here is actually comfrey
It just took a chunk out of my garden here and you can see even though it's the middle of winter
that there are green shoots coming up from this already the way I use comfrey is
I plant it and then
It has deep roots that go way down into the soil and break up this clay soil
But also it brings up nutrients into the leaves and every once in a while when it gets too robust in the garden
I just chop down the leaves and
Put them in a spot in the garden where I'd like to improve the soil
It turns into a kind of a blackish brownish cover
Quite quickly and really does serve to improve the soil
dramatically now one caution about using comfrey is that if you just go and dig a patch of
Comfrey from the wild or from the roadside or whichever
It's not going to be this type of comfrey the type I use is 'Bocking 14' comfrey, which is a sterile comfrey
It doesn't spread around so much by seeds
So I would recommend if you if you can find it to take the trouble to get the stare out comfrey
I have a really easy time of controlling where that goes in my garden
I can I can get rid of it or take it out of areas. I don't want it
whereas if you put just the natural wild comfort in you'll introduce a bunch of seeds into your garden and
That may be a lot harder to control
Alright thanks for joining me today on the topic of improving heavy soil. I guess I'll mention the last thing here
Is that aside from improving your soil one thing that would be a really good approach is
adopting two plants that do well in a heavy soil like for me, I grow lots of roses and
Happily they do pretty well in a heavy rich soil
As long as it's not a an impenetrable clay, you should be able to get along with plants like that
There's a whole list of plants you can just google them as you know
Ornamental plants for heavy soil or clay soil or edible plants for clay soil if there's any demand for it
I'll do some videos on those topics separately and
The final approach you can do if you really must have plants that don't do well in a heavy clay soil raised beds
Alright, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions or comments, please leave those below the video