Gardening is clay soil isn't as nasty as you would think. Yes it takes allot of work to improve it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the power to keep moisture and allot of nutriments that other soils can't. The drawback is that clay does not drain well and has pour aeration. This could all be corrected with the adding of organic matter to the soil.

Clay is classified as a heavy soil. To enhance clay soil you want to understand it's characteristics. All soil is made up of sand, silt and clay partials. Clay is the finest of the partials, silt being intermediate and sand being coarse. The positive side of having clay in soil is it is adversely charged giving it the power to hang onto or absorb positively charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to prosper from. This process is named cation and is what makes clay a relatively fertile soil, unlike sand which isn't adversely charged and can't hang onto or absorb the necessary nutriments and moisture needed for most plants to survive.

Improving the composition of clay soil is the only possible way to enhance it to make it easier workable. You will need to know the share of clay, silt and sand of the soil to correctly do this. Soil with over a 40 % clay partials is generally classified as clay soil. To discover what the share of clay in your soil is you simply need to take a sample.

In collecting a good soil sample it needs to be a good representative of the garden area. If the soil looks different in other locations of the garden you should take examples of the numerous areas separately.To collect a good correct sample that represents your garden you must pick an area and scrape away about the first in. of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden spade about 6 inches deep. After you dig the hole take a slice of soil along the side of the hole the full depth and place the sample in a plastic sandwich bag. Label the bag if you are sampling more than one area.

Then the sample needs to be sifted and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and break any clumps. Let the sample utterly dry for a day or 2. Once the sample is totally dry you will need to sift the roots and small stone out of the sample and breakup any clumps of soil. You can use a wire mesh or even an old colander.

After you have sifted the sample the very next step is to take the sifted soil and place it in a jar or a test tube and add a spoon of dry dish detergent. The detergent will really help to keep the soil particles separated. Now fill the jar or test tube with water, tighten the lid and shake the jar to dilute all of the sample. Check and ensure that there is no material stuck to the jar. It should only take a pair minutes of shaking to get the sample watered down. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You may start seeing the sample to start separating within an hour but it wont be fully settled out for at least a day.

After the sample has settled you will notice the layers to the sample. The most heavy layer will be the sand on the bottom, silt will be the middle layer and the clay will be the top layer. Measure the total height of all 3 layers and then measure each layer separately. Once you have all 4 measurements you can start to work out the % for each layer. As an example if the whole amount of the sample in the jar is 4 inches high and the top clay layer is 2 inches you take the 2 inches of clay and divide it by the 4 in total height to get the % for that layer. 2" divided by 4" equals .5 which is 50% clay.

A good loam or topsoil should have no more than 27 p.c clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the p.c of clay is high in your soil the most effective way to modify it is with organic matter. Do not work with clay soil when it is wet. It'll only turn into clumps. When clay is dry you can break it apart and mix compost into it. The organic matter must be worked into the soil as deep as you can get it. After you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn't a one-time job. You should keep adding organic matter into the soil in the autumn when you finish gardening for the season. In the autumn a planting of a green manure will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with further compost to add more organic matter to the soil. Click here : buy garden tools and top gardening books for more information.