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Amending Clay Soil for Organic Gardens Http://www.alisorganics.com - Clay soils hold moisture well It holds nutrients better than any other types of soil, but in order for your garden to thrive you will need to amend, amend and amend. Plants need oxygen and good drainage to prevent disease and encourage growth. Always add compost to your soils, but to help break clay up add perlite. Perlite is very lightweight and is great for drainage. Add about 4 cubic feet for every 75 square foot. Perlite will last for years in the soil. Peat moss or coconut coir is another good choice to add to dirt. In the fall time add fallen leaves and till in to add tilth. Never walk on your beds, which creates compaction. Never till the soil when it is wet! You can make concrete. And last, but not least, be patient. Making good soil can take several years, but it will be well worth it! Clay Soil Organic Garden Perlite Peat Moss Coconut CoirHi, I'm Ali Reynolds with Ali's Organics, and I'm going to show you how to plant in extreme clay soils. These beds here have been worked for many years so it does take a lot of work. This was some clay. This is basically what i had to start off with, just this clay soil. It holds water well but it's hard for roots to penetrate in this so you need to really work this soil. I remember when we first started growing here and we'd walk down the rows and we'd actually get taller when we'd walk because of the mud stuck to our feet. So, lots of work, so what we want to be adding to an extreme clay soil is of course, lots of compost. Compost is always something that you'll hear me say to add to soil whether it's sandy or clay. So we want to add lots of compost to begin with, six inches, eight inches, work it in deep. If you can work it in with a tiller twelve inches that's great, add some peat moss to that and that helps break up your soil. One key ingredient though to really help with the drainage which is the problem with clay soil is we don't have drainage. This is Perlite, it's really really light. When you use it you may want to use a dust mask because there is a lot of dust that happens when you pour it out so I will add about four cubic foot to 75 square foot. I'll work that into the soil really deep. This does not absorb water. I like using this Perlite better than I do Vermiculite because it has better drainage. I've used both. I've had better success with this. So work this into your soil really deep. You'll only need to put this in once unless you're still having issues. Then you can do it again in four or five years but there's no need to do it more often than that. But add that compost, every single time you plant, work it in and work it in deep. Go in, you want to get into this soil twelve inches, work it in there until you start seeing you have a nice loamy soil, really loose to where when you end up squeezing it together and you drop it, it falls apart, where like this clay soil when you drop it, it doesn't fall apart. It's just a big old mess and so that's why you want to work all of your organic material in here and don't use synthetic fertilizers because it adds salts and it also causes more problems. Don't walk on your soil because that causes compaction. So, just till your soils and make it to where you can reach across your beds so that you don't have to compact the soils. So, if you've got really hard clay soil like I did, there's hope. You can still pull it out of it and grow a great garden.