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Gardening is clay soil isn’t as bad as you would think. Yes it takes allot of work to improve it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the ability to retain moisture and allot of nutrients that other soils can’t. The downside is that clay doesn’t drain well and has pour aeration. This can all be corrected with the adding of organic matter to the soil.

Clay is classified as a heavy soil. To improve clay soil you need to understand it’s characteristics. All soil is made up of sand, silt and clay partials. Clay is the finest of the partials, silt being intermediate and sand being coarse. The positive side of having clay in soil is it is negatively charged which gives it the ability to hold onto or absorb positively charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to thrive from. This process is called cation and is what makes clay a relatively fertile soil, unlike sand which isn’t negatively charged and can’t hold onto or absorb the essential nutrients and moisture needed for most plants to survive.

Improving the structure of clay soil is the only way to improve it to make it more easily workable. You will need to know the percentage of clay, silt and sand of the soil to properly do this. Soil with more than a forty percent clay partials is generally classified as clay soil. To find out what the percentage of clay in your soil is you simply need to take a sample.

In collecting a good soil sample it needs to be a good representative of the garden area. If the soil looks different in other locations of the garden you should take samples of the different areas separately.

To collect a good accurate sample that represents your garden you should pick a area and scrape away about the first inch of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden trowel about six inches deep. After you dig the hole take a slice of soil along the side of the hole the full depth and place the sample in a plastic sandwich bag. Label the bag if you are sampling more than one area.

Then the sample needs to be sifted and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and break up any clumps. Let the sample completely dry for a day or two. Once the sample is completely dry you will need to sift the roots and small stone out of the sample and breakup any clumps of soil. You can use a wire mesh or even an old colander.

Once you have sifted the sample the next step is to take the sifted soil and place it in a jar or a test tube and add a tablespoon of dry dish detergent. The detergent will help to keep the soil particles separated. Now fill the jar or test tube with water, tighten the lid and shake the jar to dilute all the sample. Check and make sure that there is no material stuck to the jar. it should only take a couple minutes of shaking to get the sample diluted. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You will start noticing the sample to start separating within an hour but it wont be completely settled out for at least a day.

After the sample has settled you will notice the layers to the sample. The heaviest layer will be the sand on the bottom, silt will be the middle layer and the clay will be the top layer. Measure the total height of all three layers and then measure each layer separately. Once you have all four measurements you can start to figure out the percentage for each layer. For example if the total amount of the sample in the jar is four inches high and the top clay layer is two inches you take the two inches of clay and divide it by the four in total height to get the percentage for that layer. 2″ divided by 4″ equals .5 which is 50% clay.

A good loam or topsoil should have no more than 27 percent clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the percent of clay is high in your soil the best way to amend it is with organic matter. Don’t work with clay soil when it is wet. It will only turn into clumps. When clay is dry you can break it apart and mix compost into it. The organic matter needs to be worked into the soil as deep as you can get it. Once you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn’t a one time job. You should keep adding organic matter into the soil in the fall when you finish gardening for the season. In the fall a planting of a green manure will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with additional compost to add more organic matter to the soil.