Clay

[kittykat8]

The first plot I took over the soil was not that good on the main part of it and poor drainage, I did grow runner beans ok on it,and hardly any worms.Last october I losen it up and added loads and load of horse manure very well rotted and also had some leave about a year old not many, and used them. In november I got a vegetable garden rotavtor and went over the plot with it as I felt I had put far to much manure on.

Last week when I looked at the plot there were hundreds of very very fat big worms.

I have added about 320lts of compost to it Bulrush and I am going to fill it up with potatoes.

Come autumn I will pput more manure , not as much as last year, have loads of leaves rotting and homemade compost on the go and hopefully if i keep looking after it it will come back.

Marion

[bluemoon]

We found just three worms on the whole of our heavy clay allotment - and they looked small and sickly Three years later we now have worms in abundance due to the amount of organic material that we've dug in. Mostly it's been homemade compost, but also some horse manure. Once the organic stuff is added the worms just seem to appear, and the whole system just takes off. A green manure can also help as the roots start to break-up the soil even before it's dug in, but make sure you buy one that's suitable for clay as not all of them are. Also every time we've dug a new area we've used it for potatoes, not only do they do well in clay, but all that excavation helps to break everything up.

We still use a few small (1.2 x 1.2m) raised beds for carrots and salad crops, the carrots because they don't do well in clay and the salads because a raised bed is easier to protect from pests and cold by covering it with enviromesh or fleece, giving us salads for much of the year. Otherwise everything is doing well in the ground, and at least clay does have the advantage that it hangs on to the nutrients once you've put them there.