Quote:
Originally Posted by nativeplanter
I lived in Georgia for 9+ years on hard clay. For part of the garden, I turned it over with a shovel by hand and added amendments. The clay was so hard, I had to water it first to be able to get the shovel in. When I made the garden larger, I decided that this was just too, too much work on hard Georgia clay! So I just killed the Bermuda grass, put down newspaper, and put a thick layer of wheat straw over it. Did not loosen the soil at all. The plants did very well even the first year - clay can hold a lot of nutrients due to its particle structure. This was then the only area I grew tomatoes for maybe 5 years. I grew the best tomatoes there than I have anywhere else, and many of the plants grew amazingly tall (over the support that I needed an upturned bucket to reach to top of, then cascading down again, and I'm 5' 9"). When I left, the soils was black as night with worms galore. Granted, I put the waste from our little chicken coop on it two or three times (in the fall). I hated to leave that little patch behind, and to this day, I miss growing tomatoes on Georgia clay!
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I had a similar experience here in Oklahoma.
Soil so compacted I couldn't even dig it. I gave up on mine even faster though. Year one right after moving here I got 2 maybe 3 shovel widths on a 20 foot row turned and my feet hurt so much from literally jumping up and down on the shovel, that I said ..... (well I won't repeat what I said...
use your imagination), and decided to just paper and mulch alone right over the sod and plant my seedlings through that. Even planting the seedlings was a pain, but after a week I finally finished. (4 days was jumping up and down on a shovel) You can imagine my surprise when the part I didn't dig did far better than the part I did dig..even with the EXACT same mulch on both.
Neither was all that great first year though. It took about 3 years to really turn that soil productive.