what about mulch?

I've found that in gardening, the words cheap and easy don't go together very often without paying for it dearly. There is an inevitable trade off between price, time, and the amount of labor involved.

The cheap way in my opinion would involve finding a free or near free source of organic matter and a sturdy shovel to mix it in with your clay. It's hard work. I did it all through the fall and into the winter. I went through about 3 1/2 cheaply made shovels, so i've since stopped being so cheap when it comes to gardening tools. :)

If by mulch, you mean wood mulch, I wouldn't use it...it would tie up nitrogen in your soil for quite some time and will take forever to break down. I put some raised beds in several years ago over a mulched area and the mulch is still down there, not doing much at all.

Hope that helps...

-Matt

Ezzirah,
I'm sure Dawn will add her knowledge soon. She has lots of experience gardening with clay. I haven't. What I can say is if you are talking about straw, grass clippings, hay, ect for mulch is it should work well. Does for me. I worked 6 inches of mulch in last fall and you can see any now in the soil. Any good compost would be good I think. At least any we have here. Most of my compost comes from manure, hay and grass clippings and works well. Like Matt said from reading posts on here I would say you can find some fairly cheap ways but not any easy ways. Dawn may set me straight. Best wishes with your effort to improve your clay. Jay

Ezzirah,

If there were a cheap, easy way to amend clay soil, it would be all that we talk about here because it would be like a 'miracle drug' for clay soil.

Sand alone added to clay gives you something like adobe, which is great as a building material but not so great as a growing medium. You can add coarse builder's sand as long as you add an equivalent amount of compost at the same time.

Improving clay isn't a fast process. Doing it well takes years of adding organic matter to the the clay. Every year the soil will get better and better. Organic matter can be found in many forms and not all of them are expensive. My favorites are grass clippings from our yard and chopped/shredded leaves from our property. I layer them on top of the beds all year long, adding more grass clippings every month, and they break down and decompose over time.

You can find inexpensive sources of organic matter, but it takes time and effort. If you don't already visit your local Freecycle and Craigslist sites, sign up for them and check them often. You'll be surprised at the compostable and mulch type materials that people give away. Check to see if your city or county shreds/chips/grinds yard waste and either sells it or gives it to residents. Often, their piles are so big that if you get the stuff from the lower part of the pile that's been there longer, it is pretty much composted when you get it so you can add it to the soil instead of using it as mulch.

In the fall, collect all the leaves you can, chop them or shred them (you can do this with a lawn mower that has a grasscatcher bag or you can put the leaves in a rubber trash can and stick your weedeater inside the can and chop them up that way). Some people here drive around in the early evening and pick up bags of their neighbors' leaves that have been placed curbside for trash pickup. Leaves are worth their weight in gold as you can use them as mulch, or compost them first and use them as soil amendments. If you have local stables or even neighbors with horses or cows, you often can obtain stable bedding mixed with manure. You sometimes have to clean the stalls or barns yourself to get it, or some of them clean out their own stalls and barns and pile up the stuff outside in a big pile you can come pick up. Stable bedding and manure need to be composted before they're added to the soil.

I mulch my pathways with straw, hay, shredded leaves and grass clippings all year long. Those materials decompose in place right beside the garden beds. In late winter, I stand in the pathway and shovel the old mulch, which is now compost, right up into the adjacent beds. This form of in-place sheet composting is more efficient than having a compost pile further from the house (although I have those too) and hauling it to the beds by wheelbarrow. Once I move all the decomposed mulch from the paths to the beds and turn it under the soil to enrich it, I put down a layer of newspaper or cardboard on the pathways and start layering on the mulch materials again.

If you are trying to improve clay quickly for planting this year, keep in mind that adding as little as 3 to 6 per cent organic matter to the top few inches of soil makes a huge difference. Over time, you'll want to increase your OM content of your soil to a higher level, but that is part of the long, slow, steady process of building better soil.

If your use of the term 'mulch' indicates you'd like to rototill fresh bark mulch or newly shredded tree trimmings into the soil, it can cause problems because it ties up nitrogen as it decomposes. However, you can use very fine pine bark mulch, often referred to as 'pine bark fines' or 'pine fines' to your soil, but add extra nitrogen sources too. I use pine fines in my home-mixed soil-less container mixes every spring. Some stores sell a mix of humus and pine fines as a bagged soil conditioner and it works pretty well.

Keep in mind that soil improvement is, unfortunately, a never-ending process because 'heat eats compost' and our heat is extreme here and it breaks down compost very quickly. This is where no-till gardening comes in. The more you rototill or turn over the soil, the more your organic matter is exposed to air and the more quickly it decomposes. So, although I added a lot of organic matter to my clay the first couple of years and rototilled it in, since then I depend more on organic matter added from the top down, as mulch that's allowed to break down over time. Once you have even a small amount of organic matter in your soil, you'll have earthworms and they'll break down the organic matter and carry nutrition lower into the soil as they tunnel around. If you don't rototill it in or do extensive soil turn-over using a shovel, it will last longer and decompose more slowly.

I add mulch to my pathways and growing beds non-stop during the growing season. The result is that red clay the color of flower pots has turned into brown, loamy clay. So, don't expect to have perfect or great soil the first, second or third year, but do expect that over time your soil will get better and better and better, and one day you'll come to the conclusion that you have pretty wonderful soil after all. Once you start seeing lots and lots of earthworms instead of an occasional one, you'll know you have turned lousy clay into great soil. The earthworms are another reason to use minimal rototilling and digging as the soil gets better and better...because you don't want to chop up or cut up all your earthworms.

Dawn

If you are looking to do flowerbeds a great way to do this is lasagna gardening (do a google search on this as there is lots of info). It can make for some very nice beds in a fairly short amount of time. Then adding each year will make it better and better.

But again, I have been growing only ornamentals, so I don't know about vegetables.

Imp

We have hard, heavy, red clay here with lots and lots of rocks. What little "soil" we have now, we've had to grow ourselves. We brought in sand and it helped quite a bit. Each year, we put in/on lots and lots of manure, leaves, wood chips, and cardboard. Lots. (I'll only use our own manure because I know what we feed our animals.)

None of it cost a dime except for the initial sand.

I do have lots, I mean lots of earthworms, darker, not the "red clay" that lots of people in Oklahoma are forced to contend with, it's not bad, it is just too clay to grow things well. These are for my beds this year, I can check around for hay mulch, or straw mulch and compost. I was going to get mushroom compost, but it seems everywhere I looked they don't sell it anymore...

Oh, btw, I will go cheap on mulch, but my garden tools, no way!!

ezzirah011 - Our Lowes has mushroom compost in bags. We can buy it in bulk here, so I never buy the bags unless I am really desperate.

Soonermom - where are you at?