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.