Which Clay Soil Amendment is Best? PART 2

I want to see worm castings next if you ever try this test again

Did you do a soil test on the test ones? That also might help

Thank you. Excellent information and well done experiments.

Great experiment. I live in California wine country in the clay

Love to see cover crop like winter rye.
Nice project.

Amazing work planning, executing, and reporting on this experiment. Thank you!

Wow I’ve just found you channel. I’m in Columbus Ohio. This will be my 2nd year gardening. I could go on and on …. But, suffice it to say you are a breath of fresh air.. I can’t wait to implement your suggestions. Thank you so much so much so much.❤

This was a great video. You saved me from adding sand to my clay soil. I might have missed it but I didn't see your final analysis of biochar.

Awesome video! I think Biochar is a long term investment while cow manure is a short term investment. This means, you will need to periodically add cow manure to your soil (each year to every other year) while biochar, once you get the soil amended where you like it, is a permanent upgrade. I could be wrong though.

Add gypsum

Need to check City ordinance to see if I can keep a cow before I research cow maintenance. 🤣

Doing a layer of wood chips has been the most effective with my sticky clay. I like to add it in the fall and the wet winter helps integrate it. Ultimately, anything that builds humus in the minerally soil. Nice experiment

Sweet Lovely Voice.

I live in Lakeport CA. The ground here is lake bottom clay, I have access to horse manure and its great plus added sand good drainage but it will take several years to build up this soil.

Clear results!!

amendments are work to this or that extent. best to do a soil test, the Albrecht soil test by say Logan Labs or Brookside Laboratories. you can ask for recommendations from both labs. what are added are mineral amendments like limestone, rock phosphate, gypsum etc. amendments like sand, biochar, compost work different in soil but all of them work. in the end though, concentrate on growing healthy plants which will foster great soil, period, full stop. great experiment really...blessings

Great job you are doing good work, good luck!

Enjoyed this video. Good information.

Lovely review. We will be going with the cow poo , we can get it free and by the trailer load. Looks like my summer will be carting trailer after trailer of nice smell cow sh,,,t. Wish I had gone with the tipping trainer😂

What are fabulously detailed and well conducted experiments. Greetings from Hertfordshire,England, where I pay an annual visit to my local farm and collect sacks of horse manure.

Why didn't you do one without any amendments 😂

Very good experiment and very complicated topic. I had some thoughts.

I got free sand from my neighbors but it was really fine sand, similar to play sand. I noticed fine sand didn't not drain. It's better to use washed plaster sand as it's more coarse.

Since you used grow bags, this may skew the results because same soil mixes might accept the water into the soil easier, whereas some bags (crusty top) that don't accept water will run out the side. So some plants may not be getting enough water, I think plastic pots may be a more realistic to in ground beds.

Grow bags allow a lot of air exchange to the roots so this might benefit soils with organic matter. If manure or compost was mixed in ground with clay, the decomposition might use up all the oxygen and cause root rot. This is less likely to happen in grow bags due to all the air surrounding the soil.

This experiment should only be considered for annual plants as they usually have more shallow root systems. For trees, organics in the soil will probably cause root rot as the compost decomposes. Your tree will sink after a few years and this will also compress the roots.

we add peat to our clay to grow blueberries- it acidifies the soil a LOT

of course these days you have to watch out that the animal manure doesnt contain Grazon. so test your manure before putting it on the soil

Very interesting! It's great you're willing to put in this kind of work rather than sticking to easier/flashier content that every garden channel has done a dozen times already. I'm also working with clay in zone 6a (Colorado), so this has been super helpful!

Thanks for the awesome experiment. I have black gumbo soil. I think the worms did the work because the manure was present. I may try manure and biochar together based on what I saw in your results. Happy gardening!

I just bought 4 bags of composted cow manure from Rural King. Once fall comes around, and I remove my ornamentals from my clay soil raised bed, I'm going to dump it in the bed, along with some biochar and greensand, maybe a bit of peat moss too, and use a small axe to chop and blend it in as good as I can, then hope that next year I can grow some tomatoes in that bed. I already have all of the ingredients, I just bought the cow poo, but, I have the other stuff. My bed is a Hugelkultur bed, so, the soil will eventually go down as the logs below rot, plus the whole thing settling. Eventually, it will need topped off with soil, and I can chose to use good well draining bagged soil anyway. My natural soil is loam with clay underneath, so, having clay under well draining soil is okay. But, I still want to improve what I have now in that bed.

Seems like 1:1 was a lot of sand.

One year I made a new bed with just native clay soil, put two big bags of cow manure compost on top, zero added fertilizer, grew bellpepper, and it was the best bellpepper harvest I ever had. The plants started to catch blight later in the season, I sprayed with Monterey fungicide and the new leaves all came up green and the harvest continued. I do notice though that since I neglected to add leaves or compost to that bed over the winter, the next year the soil was lacking nutrients and the plants didn't grew as well. So I still believe in amending with fertilizer for optimal yield.

My only issue with cow manure compost is it can be contaminated with aminopyralid which I've had bad experience with, hence I tend to go for leaf or mushroom compost.

When I first started gardening I used to watch John Kohler and respect to what he does, but at the time I was in tropical climate with sandy soil and I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on worthless soil amendments that he recommended; rockdust, biochar, compost tea, mycorrhiza. It's laughable to think back now but I was stupid enough to believe in buying sea salt to add micronutrients to the soil, I just ended up killing the plants with too much salt application, and I was totally scammed into buy cheap sea salt where you could just get a cheap bag from a asian grocery store. All useless waste of money. Then I learned about compost and back to eden mulching and that changed everything. Of course it make more sense using compost layer as a mulch for vegetables, rather than woodchips. But even with fertilizer application, it all get washed away in the sandy soil. The compost is what allowed the soil the capacity to hold the water and retain the nutrients.

I don't believe in buying worm castings. I make sure to put down organic matter at the end of the season and the worms produce the casting for you on location.

Making char is quite entertaining can be as simple as digging a hole and then consistently feeding it and quenching it when done.

I like to use dried grasses and seedy weeds in an improvised retort (metal container packed and flipped upside-down with the fire built around it.

Hi Jenna, I thoroughly enjoyed your scientific experiments. Thank you for sharing your takeaways with us! Cheers, Albert from San Francisco

If your mixing a lot of soil, would a cement mixer do a good job? Just trying to figure out what would make the job easier with these old hands.

Adding sand to clay soil you'll get Bricks. In my personnel experience with Ohio Clay soil I got the best results with leaves.

I wish you would have did worm castings as one too. That’s what I use as a soil amendment for my garden and on my lawn after aerating and it results in really nice soil!

I have to wonder if the liquid aerator works better for folks trying to restore soil biome after years of spraying pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.. which is a huge issue here in the Illinois burbs. Despite everything happening with our climate and all the readily available info, people around here appear to be INCREASING their commercial office park style lawn/yard care.. it’s driving me nuts. This area is suffering from rapacious real estate developing (bulldozing historic structures, deforesting, utterly destroying swamp and prairie, dropping in massive foamcore McBuildings) and the reaction of the plebs appears to be living in a constant state of “staging their homes”…. I’m sure I sound like a grouchy NIMBY but truly it’s causing a visible gaping loss of basic ecology, especially trees, at such a time no less!
Every single day at least two nearby homes have massive commercial landscaping crews running equipment that would give a jet engine a run for its money; shaving, plucking, sousing and blow drying the yard like getting twice weekly trips to the salon. 🤦‍♀️
And now all the local wildlife is attracted to my yard, go figure..
pssst: if animals don’t want to be in your yard… what do you think you are? 🤭
I forgot what I was even saying, so deep in my feelings over this issue.
Ah.. soil biomes. Could you imagine if subdivisions engaged in social community permaculture with the same level of verve they’re devoting to voiding their spaces out? It could be paradise.

Yes--test chicken manure and maybe some sort of liquid fish/kelp fert!

Thank you for all the hard work in testing these amendments in clay soil. We have clay soil and it's difficult to deal with for us novice gardeners. I heard about using gypsum and tried that but was very disappointed with the lack of results. I guess I'll stick with the ol' cow manure.

I grew watermelons in plain sand and was great

Try Bokashi

Cow and horse manure need to age for a long time before using on plants plus can be contaminated.

I've seen major improvement in soil structures by adding 4 to 6 inches of fall leaves to top of garden / growing areas in late fall and just letting break down till spring , especially over a matter of multiple seasons . If leaves are mulched with bagged lawn mower it will help speed up break down .

I love the scientific approach to problem solving a lot. Im dealing with trying to grow in very clay heavy soil. I live near Albuquerque, New Mexico by the Rio Grande in a town called Corrales. Basically a river forest edge. I have a shit ton of bugs (mainly pests, working hard to promote beneficial insects to equalize the ecosystem) and concrete clay soil. My yard has two massive trees in it that spread massive roots all throughout the ground. The soil is INFESTED with grubs. Ive already applied beneficial nematodes but its the first time applying so the grubs are still kicking around down there. There is a fungi system underground in some areas of the garden which is good. Recently, i picked up some mushroom compost from lowes for 4 dollars a big bag (idk how many pounds, maybe 8? Its those big bags you would usually find soil in any big box store in ). I dug soke holes where i am putting plants, and filled it with the compost and planted a few in it already. I have planted salvia, candytuft, and tickseed in the compost so far and although its only day 1, they all seem to be doing extremely well. The salvia and candytuft had been planted in a mixture of the clay soil and perlite (me, not knowing anything about gardening thinking mixing perlite with clay will help drainage lol) they started suffocating after a couple days, yellow leaves, droopy stalks. Just overnight after planting in a hole filled with mushroom compost, they immediately perked up, stiffened, and seem to be happier, although this could probably be due to the roots being aerated. After watching this, i will leave them in the MC if they keep going strong. But i will pick up some cow manure for the vegetable garden area. I have potatoes, onions, leeks, watercress, horseradish, and 2 pepper plants in the veggie garden so far, all planted in the clay soil that i mixed with big bags of organic potting soil. Surprisingly theyre doing good, at least the potatoes and onions and leeks. The pepper plants have yet to see much growth in comparison. Theyre are definitely going to need cow manure. I was about to expand the veggie garden plot by scratching up the surface and mixing in more mushroom compost, but now i will make sure to get some composted cow manure for this area. One good thing about my soil is it is chock full of earth worms as well. Lots of organic matter from the trees has fallen into the soil over the years, although where i live its extremely windy, dry, and close to the sun so a lot of the organic matter gets brittle and blown around, resulting in the healthiest areas being next to the fence on all sides. Cultivating the soil is extreme hard work due to having to dig througu concrete when dry, mud when wet, and on top of that, cutting massive tree roots with an axe. I know raised beds would be 10x better for growing vegetables but i felt as if i needed to learn how to amend the soil and make it productive and bring it back to full glory. Your video has helped me gain so much insight and saved me so much time of trial and error and saved me so much money that wouldve been wasted on letting plants die, buying all kinds of products, etc. So THANK YOU

Thank you for this!

You forgot a container with all amendments for your control

From experience you need a minimum of 2 applications of gypsum fall and spring, ideally a third the following fall. The difference the following spring is completely unbelievable. also after dosing you can add manure and your yield will increase exponentially improve.

Wow, I am blown away by this video! Thank you so much for doing all of that work, and documenting so thoroughly! This is amazing.

My best results for my small garden was Black Cow Manure I love love love it that's all my parents used in the garden and lime but for my Clay soil its a wrap That's it that's all😂😂💖👍

I used gypsum here in NE TN and it has been in the ground for 6 mths. No change to the soil that I can tell😢 I have cracked hard rock orange clay. Still the same when used in lawn and when dug into beds

I love sheep manure for overall soil improvement. I bed/litter with straw which makes a super compost, amendment and fertile mulch.