Remedy for clay soil?

[Jesse Glessner]

Hello! New here, but have been on another gardening forum, from a gardening magazine (that went out of business). My problem is the soil in our neighborhood -- we're on the site of an old (1940s) stock-car racetrack
Tigsy

I had the problem of a lot of clay hauled in to raise the level of my property - free soil but I paid drivers for each truck load delivered. After that I was trying for a whole "raised garden" and found a place that sold bulk garden soil and bulk mulch and had around 14 cubic yards of each hauled in and dumped and I shoveled every bit of that to my actual garden area. The problem - trucks too heavy and soaked soil and a lot of that went back to filling tire tracks in the lawn.

SO, if you dig out some of the clay BE SURE that you know exactly how deep, wide, and long you want the good patch of soil to be. The 14 cubic yards of soil and 14 cu. yd. of mulch seemed a huge amount until it was spread. You might actually be better off with buying enough cement block to sit on top of the clay and fill that area with bulk garden soil. You should have better results as that soil will drain down into the clay. Good luck! Hang in and it will eventually be well worth fixing the problem.

 

[DirtMechanic]

I went out with swimming pool test strips and I keep coming in with 8ph as a probable average. I ordered 250 lbs of pelletized sulfer. I ran a separate test and in confirmed ph but I blew up the npk part by useing my ph nuetral tap water instead of distilled for the npk.

Only use a ph 7 base liquid for ph. Only use distilled for n,p,k. 2 separate liquids make the cheap tests accurate.