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Old August 22, 2008   #8
TZ-OH6
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Mid-Ohio
Posts: 847
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Thanks for the replies,


Sieving is out, there is 1000 sq ft of garden dug down from 16-40 inches, and the clay gooballs often have a rock in the middle, and are either to dry-hard or too wet-plastic to be broken up by a sieve.


The soil is ultraheavily ammended with composted woodchips, with more to come. There is a decent amount of sand in the sediment so once organic matter is added and the clay is broken up the soil becomes very friable. Unfortunately we had a very wet spring and I had to shovel-mix the compost into wet soil so there are a lot of softball to baseball sized clay gooballs coated in black compost. Some of the clay balls are pure greasy blue-gray clay, but most are yellow clay due to the red sandstone sand content. The bestway to break them up by hand is to get them on the surface let them dry for a couple of days and whack them with a shovel to shatter them. A tiller can cut them up and coat them with compost if they are not dry enough to crumble.

It sounds like a tiller will work for me. I dont' mind if the tiller beats me up, as long as I don't have to stop every two minutes to unbind it because of a little rock.
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