I haven't used any of their products so I can't say one way or the other.

The one thing that concerns me is that they don't give any information about what's actually IN the products. What are the ingredients? I trust they're Organic if they say so, that's not the issue. But when you sell a product and just call it Optimizer or Maximizer and don't give any idea about what's in it, I am immediately suspicious of two things: 1) will it work better or faster than compost and 2) if it does, is it worth the cost, or can I get the same effect for a much lower price with a different product? JMHO. Understand, I'm not saying these products don't work, they probably do something.

I do have clay though, and compost works. In fall I add compost to the surface (if too wet or hard and dry to dig), then cover with a compostable mix of leaves/grass or whatever I've got. Layer up as high as you want, just make sure it's even over the entire area. In spring, the soil will be softer and easier to dig.

Lots of other clay advice here on the forum if you haven't seen it already.

Thanks @toxcrusadr

Good point about what is in them...I sent them an email to hopefully learn more. I'll keep looking for advice on clay soils. The top just stays so dry on mine, even after using tons of wood chip compost/mulch this past spring summer. Then halfway through summer I did a few inches of Coast of Maine compost and the wood chip mulch again....both applications seemed to have leveled out at this point in new beds, but water still sits on top for quite a bit.

I could excavate and put lots of compost deep and restart...but was hoping to find some easier fixes. Might be dreaming on that being possible though.

Excavating and replacing or amending is usually not a good idea with clay. If you're in a climate that gets rain - like I am in Missouri - making the soil more porous will create a bathtub effect where water runs in from the sides and top and collects because it can't run out through the clay. Of course you have to dig some but digging down a foot and adding a lot of compost is not recommended if surrounded by unamended clay. Moderate amending combined with some raising will be better.

I started with heavy clay a long time ago. As I began to amend it and add occasional bags or loads of topsoil to it, and the occasional salvaged sand bag, etc., the beds started to raise up. The extra fluff created by the compost helps too - the soil literally becomes more porous and is bigger as a result. Over time you'll see positive effects.

You could also raise the beds in a hurry by importing a large amount of soil. I've started raising my 4x12 vegetable beds from their ~4" high level acquired over time, to more like a foot, one bed at a time. I have a source for topsoil (basin behind a culvert inlet) that actually needs to be cleaned out, so I know I'm extra fortunate on that. Whatever your source is, if you can raise up a bed with soil amended with 1/4-1/3 compost by volume, the benefits can be enormous if you're on heavy clay. Just my two cents.

Great, thanks so much for all this info. Makes sense and gets me thinking about options. I started 3 new rose beds this past spring and worked a lot of compost and mulch in to them. They're already planted so I'm not sure raising them would be easy for me. Maybe, I will look into how to do that.

I'm in upstate NY so we average 48 inches rain, and 42 of snow (usually). I'm thinking to help those beds out over winter, I'll add a lot more compost and mulch around the plants without touching them, and let winter do it's thing with the material. Maybe it will help the soil by next spring but I know it will take a few years + to really get the soil in those areas to start holding water and breathing a little more.

What kind of sand bags do you usually add? I was reading about coarse sand or granite can help. Sounds like a similar idea to when I pot up my succulents and use mostly grit with some added peat-soil to help drainage. Maybe if I add a layer of some type of pure grit in these beds, top it with tall layer of woodchip mulch, the grit will work it's way down and loosen up the soil in the beds. Or maybe it will start creating that bathtub effect you mentioned. Still waiting to hear back from that john and bobs place so I'll keep you posted on what they have to say too. Thanks for the tips on this

Sand can be dangerous in clay because it acts similar to the gravel in concrete, and you can end up with something like concrete! Unless you add more than the critical amount, which is about 1/3 by volume, OR you add only SMALL amounts along with lots of compost. If you can find silty material, it mitigates the concrete effect and helps create loam, a mixture of all particle sizes.

Some of the compost products I've seen around here have a little sand in them, either because it helps the soil texture or just because they're cheap bastards. :-] However you do it, go sparingly with sand.

Have you had your soil tested as to texture and grain size, or performed a jar test yourself? Are you sure it's clay, or is it silty clay or clayey silt?

I'm overly skeptical perhaps but sounds like snake oil to me. I mean, I'm sure there's something in there, perhaps something "good", but really unlikely it'll do that much and at that price.

Get as much organic materials in as you can at a reasonable price - compost, wood chips, manure, whatever - and let it do its thing over time. You may have to do for a few years in a row. Digging/spading in a bit will be easier after it's laid on top for a while. (I don't mean digging deep and mixing, just a little bit of cracking the soil). Sure, if you can get some proper soil to mix in there, but again if reasonably priced and soil-like. Outdoors a lot of stuff will grow in compost when there's soil of whatever kind underneath, even clay.

Upstate new york sounds fine for this. Ask around your neighbours what's worked as well. But be cautious about expensive additives.

Improving a heavy clay soil does not happen overnight and like armoured, I'd be skeptical of products that do promise that fast a turn around. I also find them unnecessarily expensive compared to easily obtaining compost or other common organic matter that will accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost. (notice the quantity of the kits/ingredients goes up significantly when addressing a larger area than 250sf.

@toxcrusadr - sounds good, I am overly cautious about adding big volumes of sand to anything. I grow a lot of indoor plants/succulents and it took me a few years to realize that the best thing for them is pure grit mix (sometimes a little bit of peat) otherwise things just start hardening and turning into dry/concrete type mix that kills the roots. Now they grow and are much happier in boring clay pots and grit mix..but the plants look great ;) Maybe I could add some decent size gravel under my next round of compost/mulch layers...and it will make it's way down into the beds and break up the soil/create air?

I have to get my soil tested with one of those mail in labs. It's rocky clay with the dry top layer that's pretty hard to get into with a shovel or pickaxe. Muddy and sticky when wet but brittle when dry. Not sure whether it's silty clay/clayey silt. I will have to look up how to perform a jar test myself, no clue how. Any ideas?

@armoured - Yeah I agree. More I looked into it the more it seemed snake oil like. Hardly any reviews online, and no response yet from them over email.

I think I'll try the slower process of spading and layering on top. I was reading that tilling can actually be bad..and it's better to gently create air pockets with pitchfork and then add compost/mulch/organic layers to go down over time.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) -Think I was just hoping for a quick fix for these beds since I planted so many new roses and plants this year, without amending too much. Just added lots of compost and mulch on top. But yeah definitely seems fishy.

Has anyone ever used a soil conditioner (pellets or liquid) that would help with this even if not immediately like this one product claims? I was reading about humic acid and some different things that might be able to be added on top or poured into beds to help aerate and better clay soil but wasn't sure if that was safe for perennials or just lawns, which is what the products I found were advertised for.

Yes, I wouldn't personally till in (although I can imagine there could be circumstances). I think the compost/mulch is actually more important than the spade work but can't hurt. Another option is planting some sort of cover crop that has deeper roots.

I'm skeptical about the humic acid and other pills and tablets; humic acid itself is going to be in the compost and organic materials over time. What you really want is fungi, bactiera, soil organisms, worms, roots of plants all doing their thing. Leaves, wood chips, etc are loved by the fungi and probably like your climate.

That said you can get a soil test, there are some less expensive regular soil additives - gypsum, dolomitic lime (calcium carbonate), others - that can have some impact. The main thing is these are not expensive in the volumes needed.

But I'd still start with and focus on just lots and lots of organic material and mulch.

I have used J&B's Optimizer - in my community garden plot about 10 years ago when I was converting it to raised beds. Unfortunately I have no data to share. At the same time I added compost, manure, and leaf mold - I was pretty much throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to amend that soil. It turned out really well - but what the Optimizer contributed is unknowable. (Probably less than all the other ingredients.)

Of course that was a tiny area (10' x 20'), so the cost wasn't extravagant. In my current beds I just dug down about a foot and half (in heavy clay soil - mostly fill the builders dumped to raise the level on the hill to build the house). I then turned in mushroom compost, leaf mold and aged manure - all in the very early spring three years ago. I then started planting that June, and it has been great.

As has been already said, your biggest bang for the buck to improve clay soil will be some kind of organic material like compost. If you turn it in and break up the clay as much as you can (a lot of backbreaking work - but you only have to do it once), you can plant the same year - but the soil will really be much improved the following year after some of that compost has broken down and made the soil a more crumbly texture.

One last thing - clay soil is a great starting point. The mineral content is usually high and it has a natural ability to grab nutrients and hold on to them for the fungus and roots to process. With some organic matter amendments, it turns into an ideal garden in just a year or two. Drainage is the only thing you have to pay close attention to. For that reason, I tend to dig down lower that a foot when I am initially breaking it up. You don't want a "bathtub effect" where the water hits the unamended clay soil and then drowns the plant roots.

Just a random article that came up in my feed about mulch and Clay soil. In short another vote for wood chips, lots, frequently, and not bothering with digging.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/13/james-wong-on-gardens-no-dig-mulch-with-bonus-mushrooms

Thanks for these tips.

@Richard Brennan - Great ideas on amending the clay. I'm working hard at trying my own compost and adding as much natural, tree wood chip mulch as I can to these beds. Sadly I planted roses in all of these new beds I built this past spring, so the plants are already in there. I cant really dig them back up (I could but with my luck the roses would all die after digging up to till/amend soil).

Trying to figure out the best ways to layer on top of the beds, especially over winter here in zone 5 and keep helping the soil. I actually live near a lot of woods, and have been trying to read up on leaf mold but most info I find is about making your own. There is tons of fresh leaf mold all around my property in the wooded area.

Do you think guys think there is any benefit to just gently shoveling as much of the top layers of leaf mold into my wheelbarrow, and adding it to these beds. I was thinking to keep it away from the stems/crown of the roses, but layering it on the beds with wood chips on top.

I've been reading about JADAM gardening techniques with using local leaf mold to make compost tea for your garden soil. It's getting cold at nights here though, so I can make teas in my buckets anymore outside. But was thinking local leaf mold layering on top of new beds might eventually sink in and help soil

@armoured - Great article, I like this way of thinking. There is so much natural material to use, especially when out here with wooded areas around houses. I used a lot of wood chip compost, and then wood chip mulch on top of it this season, and had tons of mushrooms growing up through it around my roses, along with slime molds. I used lots of egg shells, coffee grounds from local shop, and alfalfa tea too. I'm still not even sure if the slime molds were a good sign, but I left everything there to do it's thing in the garden beds.

In this JADAM book I'm reading they talk a lot about using local material because then the microbial life is actually suited for your personal garden. It's not store bought, so less of a guessing game with regard to what will do well in your own setting.

I just dug out half a pile of well-composted leaves from last fall, and they're great - and I didn't even realise I was making leaf mold. Rich dark earthy stuff, light and easy to spread. I wholly agree with the point above that shredding leaves makes them break down a lot faster and easier (in my specific case, maple leaves esp). I did a bit of watering - not sure that was even necessary - and a small amount of turning, mostly just pile it up and forget about it. One small note, it's easy to look at the pile and think not much is happening - the outmost layer tends to look like it's staying the same; but the final volume was one-half to one-third the original size. Some very fat and happy earthworms were in that pile.

Also worth noting: I've done this several years, and one constant is that the ground where the pile was is soft, springy and completely different (after the leaves removed, and fairly deeply down). My soil also tends to clay - can't say for certain this will work for all soils, but you could experiment pretty easily by putting your leaf pile for a season on a place you want to make a bed later; just pile up leaves in that spot, whether as a very thick mulch or a pile. (I tend to do one very large pile for space and cold-winter heat/decomposing purposes).

Also spent a good part of the day chipping most of a big old apple tree that died (most except the thickest logs and branches). I like doing this - even if it is real work - but every time it's a surprise just how much a very large pile of branches turns into a not very large pile of wood chips - and that's before those wood chips settle and compost some. I'll probably figure out what to do with them in the spring.

The other source of some organic material I just spread was a good-sized pile of wood shavings a neighbour was getting rid of, mixed with some manure and left to sit for half a year. Decent stuff but not as nice as the leaf mold.

@Richard Brennan -Thanks for the great info on leaf mold. In this JADAM organic gardening book I'm reading they talk about using leaf mold and soil from surrounding area of your garden to create compost teas. I figure if the forests around my yard have all of this material, I should try some instead of buying everything over and over again from a nursery. I've been saving my coffee grounds for a while now and will keep raking and mowing my leaves to shred them.

I was told to get some aged horse manure and found some, but it's about an hour drive so I'm debating whether it's worth it to fill up my truck and mulch with it. Especially in these new beds that could use some help with my native soil.

My time might be better spent driving to the beach to collect seaweed to lay over the beds for winter.

@armoured I like the idea of using leaves like this, thanks for the advice. I started to think about this because of a similar instance this year, where I found this pile of old soil from pots I dump out over the last few years in one corner of my property. Leaves and forest "stuff" had been naturally falling and doing their thing on top of this old potting soil mound...and when I started to push around with my shovel, it looked like really nice soil I'd buy from a store with the leaves crumbling inside of it.

Might as well use what's around us. Also like the idea of using material that's as local as I can since I assume those are the 'life forms' that will do well with my climate. No point spending $$ to basically import all these fancy "mycorrhiza" or fungus life forms in bagged forms. Maybe there are reasons to do that even with access to forests around me? There's so much info out there advocating bagged products. Might as well start here on my land first and if it all goes to hell, I can decide whether it's worth the extra money to try bottled or bagged stuff

Quick question - If I collect some of the 'leaf mold' or rotting leaves and topsoil mix that's in the wooded area around my property and lay that over my newest garden beds, mix it with coffee grounds, would I put it on top of wood mulch, or the wood mulch on top of the leaves/coffee? Still learning about layering, and I assume wood mulch first in case it pulls nutrients from current beds, and then leaf mold/coffee on top of that to replace anything it's pulling?

Personal opinions only - don't bother with compost teas, magical properties attributed to them that likely don't exist, as with most magical properties. Leaf mold first, wood chips on top. Chips on top won't pull nutrients from below, meaning from roots of anything growing. And strong opinions exist about taking materials from forested areas, ie don't unnecessarily harm the forest - a bit probably won't matter but better to use stuff from elsewhere like if neighbours are throwing out their leaves. You probably don't need to worry so much about where compost is from and foreign organisms, it's usually reasonably local. Just check first that it's what you want and smells and looks like compost. Up to you about driving for manure, but there's very little magic about adding organic materials - quantity matters so go with what's easy and cheap. Best of all is what you can generate on site, often limited mainly by space and patience.

Wood chips decompose slower than leaves and coffee grounds, so I would put the wood chips on top. Always the material closer to being compost, goes on the bottom next to the soil. As it decomposes the upper layers of slower-degrading stuff will follow. I don't know that I learned this anywhere, but it sure makes the worms happy.

Great thanks for these layering tips!

I may drive out to the farm with free aged horse manure tomorrow to pick up as much as I can fit in my truck.

I keep reading how good horse manure and fresh seaweed from beach is for soil and roses...might be worth giving it a try since I have a little extra time right now with covid.

Would you put manure and/or fresh seaweed on top of the wood mulch? Or wood mulch ALWAYS on top of everything else underneath that is going to act as "compost" like you said @toxcrusadr

I guess wood chip 'mulch' would mean it is the final top layer no matter what.....

@armoured

Yeah I think I may skip the tea for the time being. Too cold out here at night already. Nothing would probably survive well out there at night in my alfalfa tea buckets.

Thanks for the help, hopefully I'll get better at layering my soil and start some even bigger beds next year for food crops and more pollinator gardens

Yeah, wood always on top, unless it's the only layer...then I guess it's still on top!

With manure, there is a risk of hay and weed seeds since horses don't digest seeds that well, but the wood chip mulch will keep them down .

Just to note, you can mix in or layer on top of a previous layer of wood chip mulch if it's well aged, don't need to remove every time. If you have extra manure and wood chips, you can mix some and let them compost / age in a pile.

Great to know, thanks @armoured. Some of my wood mulch is still on top of my beds (last laid in June), along with the compost I put down under it that had oyster shells. Can still see those everywhere so the mulch and compost must have mixed up.

I was going to add the rest of my wood mulch tomorrow, along with this organic fertilizer I have called rose tone. Maybe I'll put that down first and then the new layer of wood mulch.

Gotta collect my yards leaves and shred those up with my mower over the next month. Then in mid-November I'll put those down, coffee grounds, and fresh wood mulch on top of all that for winter.

Sound like a good plan?

Don't apply the Rose Tone now. Dry organic fertilizers like Rose Tone and other Espoma products require the activities of soil organisms to break them down into plant usable forms and this takes time to achieve. Once the soil temps start to drop in fall - generally the cut-off mark is <45F - soil microbiology becomes virtually inactive and this process stops. Applying the ferts now means the bulk of them are wasted over the winter months and just get degraded and dissipated by moisture.

Wait until spring and the soil temps begin to rise before using an organic fertilizer.

I'm a little confused by which wood mulch is going down when, how well-aged and thick. It's not a hard line, but basically you want to avoid too much wood in the plant root zone. The reason is that organisms that decompose wood chips need/consume some nitrogen to do so; they'll bring/absorb from nearby when buried. This is not permanent, it's a temporary 'tie up' of the nitrogen nearby; on the surface doesn't matter so much (think the organisms bring their own nitrogen). Amount is more surface area of the wood than weight, i.e. sawdust exponentially more likely to tie up than a buried log. Wood chips in air and exposed to soil / soil organisms pretty well-aged after, say, a year (varies of course due to weather and moisture etc); the more it smells like soil and looks dark and crumbly, the more 'done' it is. It's fine if there are bits that look like wood still of course.

That's a general description and not a prescription - you'll figure it out, just try to keep the woody stuff towards the top.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) -Makes sense. I was wondering how this all worked once the cold temps started setting in, and life in the soil. I'm guessing this applies to compost and anything I'd want to really break down and be used by the plants/life in the soil over winter?

@armoured - Sorry for the confusion. I was pretty confused myself this past spring trying to add lots of new composts and amendments. In May I added 100% tree bark compost over the new beds, and then 100% tree bark chip mulch (dark color not bulky with chips, pretty soft) over it all.

Then in July I added Coast of Maine blueberry/salmon/lobster compost on top of that....and more wood chip mulch. So now it's kind of all blended down into one layer. Can still see some of the woodchips from the mulch on the top layer but not much. I see more of the oyster shells from the coast of maine compost left on the top layers of the bed...guessing those will never fully decompose while I'm alive.

Is this way of layering during growing season ok with mulch in multiple layers spaced out over a few months? Or is it best to do one big layering attempt of composts materials and then mulch as very top layer once in spring, and then again in fall, and be done ?

Sorry for the confusion. I myself am confused but trying to learn how to naturally help my soil/land, along with the plants! It's all very interesting to think about, and even if I mess up, I am hoping that whatever natural materials I've added just make their way into the ground and help it

I don't think you need to worry so much about what you're adding and when. And I wasn't trying to frighten you with the wood chips bit, it's just a general guideline/approach. It sounds like what you have in there has aged some and is well mixed in with other stuff, will probably be fine.

As to whether you should add what at which specific time of year - depends what you're growing, annuals or plants that are quite sensitive in spring/seedlings etc (burying seedlings in mulch won't work for obvious reasons). Some will have to be from experimentation based on your climate and what you're planting, etc. Fall is usually a good time to put mulch down though.

I think the advice about winter and soil biology was (probably) a bit more specific about the stuff you wanted to apply, Rose Tone, and a waste to fertilize in cold temps / fall generally, plants aren't taking up nutrients actively for their growth cycle.

At any rate I don't fully agree that soil life comes to a standstill in cold weather - some certainly does, some doesn't, the ground has some warmth in it, compost insulates and warms as well, and snow itself insulates, there are some organisms that do well in cold weather (fungi especially), and the freeze/thaw cycle has a role in breaking down some stuff too. (There are even fungi that continue working in modest below zero temperatures - apparently the fuzz you sometimes see on grass after snow melts is an example). The soil about a metre down is said to stay pretty close to the average annual air temperature. Anyway that's not to argue the point, just to say it's normal for soil life to slow down a fair bit, but it takes off pretty quick in spring and catches up; I can see a difference of mulch and compost applied between fall and snow melt when the ground first becomes visible. I've had tulips coming up through six inches or more of snow so there's no way everything's 'stopped.' Other soil organisms go into whatever winter preps they do and they use the mulch compost for that as well.

In sum, fall is still a good time to apply your mulch/compost. You can do at other times too, with just a bit of attention to what's going on (don't bury seedlings in two feet of mulch), and can help keep weeds down if done right as well.

@armoured - Thanks for all this info. That is kind of how I am trying to think about all of this. Improve my crappy lawn I inherited from previous owner by trying to make the garden beds as close to what nature does on the forest floor, without worrying too much about damage as long as I use natural stuff.

Climate/fertilizer makes sense. Didn't think of that but wasting granular type stuff like the Tones seems like a waste for fall/winter. I'm going to try and read some more about what goes on in the soil/forest floor during winter, especially for my area, if I can find more info. Like you said, I'm sure there is a lot happening even if it's not evident during winter in the plants or trees we are trying to grow.

I like your note about tulips! My neighbor across the street has tons of them along the road because of the deer. Anyways, I'm always in awe of how they just pop up through the snow, even when it's cold and windy still here (to us). Definitely more happening below ground then we'll ever probably know.

Have you ever heard of this stuff "Sweet Peet" ? My local place down the road has it on sale right now by the yard. I was going to get the tree bark mulch from them like I did in the spring, to pile up my rose beds. But now I'm wondering if this Sweet Peet stuff which says it has manure, might be more beneficial to use as mulch. Plus it's not much of a price difference than just tree bark by the yard

Website says it's shredded wood and manure, and will act as a mulch during the growing season and decompose into humus. Which it would of course. Should be fine for your needs so use whatever suits you.

I like 'free' but it's a little more footwork and shoveling sometimes.

I have to say I have zero experience with whatever the granular product you're referring to is like. Gardengal knows her stuff. The only granular I've used is a wee bit of some nitrogen supplement (mostly) which I add in small amounts to speed up / heat up piles like wood chips. I'm not even sure it makes sense to use but it costs a dollar or two.

My only comment about most compost stuff you buy - since I don't really buy fertilizer except for the nitrogen stuff - is don't pay attention to brand names unless you really trust the company (and even then, because the only thing that matters is the batch you buy); pull some out and feel it by hand/smell/look. Bulk truckloads doesn't mean worse than a pretty bag from a store.

Manure has a distinct smell, general compost more earthy, woody stuff more mushroomy. A slightly dodgy smell from slightly wet stuff in closed bags doesn't matter much, that'll disappear with exposure to air (great if you can get a substantial discount). But there's no sense paying extra money for stuff that's basically just wood chips or bark; finely ground stuff ('fines' often cheaper because it doesn't last as long but closer to soil status). Some people care how stuff looks, because it's in their garden, nothing wrong with that if that's what they want (unless in garish fake colours in which case they are wrong). Free wood chips you mix yourself with free manure (if you can get it) is fabulous stuff in six months. Horse manure (from my limited experience) doesn't need mixed with anything, just pile it up for a bit. Sawdust or wood shavings - if it's not from treated wood - is underrated; pile it up, pee on it from time to time and leave it, mix it with other stuff, it's great.

Some places have good municipal compost facilities, I'm crazy jealous. Also for lawns and general areas, if you're spreading a half inch or less of almost any compost or organic material from time to time, it's all good and in two to six weeks invisible and you're not harming anything.

Caveat of course, every place is different, do what works for you. But adding a bit of organic material you can get for close to free usually helps and hardly ever hurts.