well @Ecompost best i could do with what i got is 5 tsp of bio media pro in a old miricle grow sprayer,i watered the shit out that clay ,just hope it distributed proper,im gonna put 4lbs of gypsum on it today,expecting rain sunday ,so if all goes well it will get disolved right were it needs to be,lmao,im not shitting you about this clay damn near had to swing a pick into it were i could dig a shovel into it,,i figure for what they are calling garden soil and the headache it has provided me with,,i will just make something of what i got,which means a lot of sifting rocks out and breaking up clay,,bright side is the clay is a good thing in the 3 part structure of a good soil base,lmao,,this shit for sure makes me feel like im out of retirement and back on the job,lmao
Have you had some of it out and done a basic soil type test mate?
The one where you take the soil from 2-10 inches and put it in a glass, then take a measure to mark the layers as they settle, sand first, then silt, then clays, work out the percentage of parts? This will better guide your decisions on what to add. you might be surprised mate. my land here is like granite in the sun, but its not clay, rather silt that is my major problem, I have sand too, but this is stratified by flooding and then baking over history before i got here. you cant put a full size pick in it more than an inch in the high sun, even with a full king kong swing. the land here eats tools.
iI you have not done this type test mate doi it now, lots of guides on youtube for this, also so a slake test, so drop an aggregate sample of your soil in water but in to a net so it cant sink to the bottom. you need an aggregate so a lump a small net, colander will work over a bowl if you aint got anything else, but i use a small net I took from a broken child toy, its literally a small white plastic basket which holds the lump, but the particles can pass freely as they break off, sinking to the bottom or clouding the water column .
Anyway drop the lump in to the water and see how it holds up. You want it to stay together if possible. if its breaking away, this is a lack of biology and healthy soil proteins therein, more organics and more biology is the answer. As the water hits the aggregate water will rush in to the pore spaces, and if the soil has weak structure it will almost explode. you really want it to hold together mate, the more that break off, the less healthy your soil is.
if you are going to add sand, may be look at paramagentic sands like greensand in order to use the natural forces and energy therein to boost the disruption of the clay particles. Be aware, clays tend to compact after heavy construction, tillage and so on. it is this practice which destroys soil proteins and so biology, but they also compact due to radical salt overloading the negative clay surface charge of clays in your part of the world and most of the rest of planet earth too.
Adding cations to compacted clays is likely to further compound the nature of compaction, this is often why we see land treated with liming practice as a solution to pH as eventually having compacted salt layers in the profile and so rather than add + or - things, its a good idea to work on introductions of biology and always see biology as the start and end of all soil. more gram negative bacteria can help you scavenge the radical ions from the clays surface and so restore clays general like for like particle charge, which in healthy systems allows small gaps in all clays no matter if we imiagine they are one lump for all. Good idea is work a penetrometer in to the profile to find the stick points,. using injection, or spiking techniques, lace the profile at this level with inoculation and bio stims. you can use N, P and ca dry nutrients. the heat energy from P helps again to break up clays, Ca as above, and N provides some grease if you will, but first thing is know your sand before you embark on this. non coated versus coated.
its much easier to add BBM and Biology and forget about all of this hassle IMO.
BBM renders soil excess cations in to more harmless states, or in fact chelates them to make them more readily plant available and less likely to bind. it introduces high volumes of Oxygen, heat and the Bio Stims required. yes its expansive, but its more long term, its the total cost of adding gypsum versus the long terms solutions offered by BBM.
I do get it, we have to work with what we have, no passing judgment, i am not fit mate and always support your choices. This is just data :-)
Clays can be resorted using Bio Balance Media, Humic Acids, Gypsum, but we might note, Ca++ is a cation, so as to the long term sustainability of gypsum I am not sure, I know it works in the short term. i havent got any l;onger term studies, but it is true calcium is a dominant ion and so it can kick off more sticky cation elements such as Sodium and magnesium and so on. it also burns higher rates of N during its decomposition that BBM mate.
