From Clay to Clay Soil in Just Three Years!

It has taken three years to get the vegetable beds in my yellow/blue soil-less ground into state that might loosely be termed a suitable growing medium.  I began with just clay.  No, I lie. I began with clay with boulders.  Rocks that ranged in size from fist to Deux Cheveaux.  Slight exaggeration, but you get the idea.  One of the downsides of a new build on a hillside was that all the topsoil was stripped off and lost as part of the basic groundworks.  Not that there was very much to start with.

The first year of growing was somewhat akin to pastry making.  Add a dollop of well rotted manure to the ground and try to rub it in to the clay.  Fail. That first year was thankfully hot and dry so my clay was more like smash-able concrete than the thick gloppy slick it is today, after the wettest first five months of the year for decades.



With very few exceptions, everything was sown in modules or pots and only planted out when fit and strong enough to fight its way into the clay.  Should it wish to.  Many things - runner beans, celeriac, okra, tomatillo - simply stayed inert in their holes for a few weeks or months before giving up and dying.

The clay was awful to work with; try sowing carrots when the closest you can get to a fine tilth is tennis ball sized irregular lumps.  The parsnips did better, each one going into a dibbed hole back filled with compost.  The first one we dug out in October was over a kilo and a half in weight, so it seems like they were happy enough.  Ditto the potatoes.  But that was about it for direct sowing.

Piles of rocks around the edge of the clay.  Not a good starting point.

But even planting out module grown plants was a challenge.  It was impossible to make anything other then an irregular clay lined hole to plant anything into.  Try as I might, I could not break the stuff down to at least give the cabbages and tomatoes some kind of root run.  I feared everything had gone into little more than a series of sunken clay pots.  Which then filled with water when it rained.

A couple of tomatoes were damaged as I tried to back fill the hole after planting and managed to drop or roll great gobbets of clay on them.

It was the best I could do, so we fed liquid seaweed and watered like mad and had a pretty good harvest.  Who needs soil?

The first year.  Cabbages and kale looking good, but the colour of the earth shows just how little organic matter there is.

Once a crop was finished I dumped compost or muck on the spot, or direct sowed green manures if the space was not to be used before the next year.  I quadrupled the recommended sowing density of phacelia and the subsequent growth seemed about right.

By year two, the vegetables beds were quite clearly a different colour to the clay of the surrounding paths.  We were making progress.

The same principle to sowing was used again with a switch to coir blocks from peat pots which had been a purchasing (translation) error.  We also had the advantage that more of the field was starting to grow grass and weeds, so this too was raked up after cutting and dumped onto any empty spaces in the beds.

And then the worms began to appear.  Where on earth from, I have no idea.  Huge, fat juicy red ones.  This must be a good sign, even if the harvest was less impressive than in the first year.  I'd run out of seaweed and soon ran out of nettles for making tea.  I didn't want to be seen walking along the lane with a bag of nettles too often; the locals probably already thought we were slightly odd.

More muck or green manures went onto the beds for the winter and where I'd run out of both and the purse was empty preventing us buying any more, any beds which were going to be dormant were covered in cardboard or plastic.  Anything to stop what I was optimistically calling soil from washing away during the winter rains.  I needn't have worried as most of the winter rains were snow-like and most of the new plants on our pergola succumbed to the prolonged cold.  Broke the clay down a treat.  But only elsewhere on the plot as my veg beds were diligently covered!

That's better - this year and I am proud to call that soil!

I have a fixed routine now.  Nothing goes in the ground without added organic matter.  Everything is composted to be returned to the plot later on.  We have had two bonfires in three years, despite felling trees for fire wood.  Everything gets cut by hand and stacked for composting.  Although I need to be more careful about roots of bindweed and creeping buttercup.  Much more careful.

So it seems that you can turn clay into soil; it takes time, of course.  And in our case about €400 in muck and bought in compost.  We might have been able to buy in topsoil for that kind of money, but we would still have needed to buy in compost or muck too.  A bare patch of land does not produce much compostable material in the first few years.

And call me stubborn, but I like working with what I've got, rather than buying a quick fix..