thinking of throwing in the towel next yr or doing a no brainer crop

[kmatt87]

the soil here in co has alot of clay in it and the saying that the area for the garden is a piece of work is an understatement. I've been working on the soil for 2 yrs and am slowly seeing improvement but between the quality and the heat i'm not pulling in enough produce to make it worth the work.

I was thinking of planting something that would do well in a warmer area of the yard and handle the soil ok. Any suggestions? If not, i might just spend next summer trying to increase the quality of the soil as much as possible.

 

[chickachee]

I don't know what really grows well in clay, but if I were you, I'd try to amend the soil as much as possible right up until it freezes. Try to get some horse manure and add your chicken manure to the garden (make sure they've aged a bit) and till it in. In Spring do the same. Also, do you have a compost pile? If so, toss that in the mix going into the garden. If not, I'd get one going. I compost as much as I can, and till the whole pile, plus leaves into the garden in the Fall and do the same in the Spring. My garden did pretty well this year and I am expecting it to improve each year.

I've always heard you can improve clay soil (but not sandy soil). I'm sure it takes a while, but you already got two years under your belt and I think Year #3 will be a lot better.

Hope this helps.
Sheila

 

[kmatt87]

I don't know what really grows well in clay, but if I were you, I'd try to amend the soil as much as possible right up until it freezes. Try to get some horse manure and add your chicken manure to the garden (make sure they've aged a bit) and till it in. In Spring do the same. Also, do you have a compost pile? If so, toss that in the mix going into the garden. If not, I'd get one going. I compost as much as I can, and till the whole pile, plus leaves into the garden in the Fall and do the same in the Spring. My garden did pretty well this year and I am expecting it to improve each year.

I've always heard you can improve clay soil (but not sandy soil). I'm sure it takes a while, but you already got two years under your belt and I think Year #3 will be a lot better.

Hope this helps.
Sheila

unfortunately we don't have a compost due to lack of room. Every bit of space we can use is being used.

 

[wyoDreamer]

I don't know the layout of you garden or where you are exactly, but could some of your problem be the wind?

Here in SE Wyoming I have given up on the native soil and everything is planted in raised beds with a soil that I mixed up from 50% native soil, and a blend of bagged topsoil, steer manure compost and mushroom compost. I still had problems getting anything to grow when I realized that the biggest problem that I am having is the dry, high desert wind. It sucks the moisture out of the plants and soil even faster than it breaks and bends the transplants over.

So I have made a 4 foot high "growhouse" that I garden in. It was designed to have removable "panels" that I could change out as needed. I made plastic covered ones for spring and fall to help keep it warm and machine fabric ones for during the summer to keep out the wildlife - antelope, gophers, skunks, coons, ground squirrels, cottentails, and jackrabbits. However, after two weeks of using the screens last summer, I have never used anything but the plastic covered panels due to the wind. My growhouse has open venting at the top on both sides, so it doesn't get too hot inside and cook the plants. I have even had to open it up in March because it got too hot inside. The greenhouse plastic that I use transmits 85% of the sunlight, which seems to be plenty with the intense sun that we get.
Next year I will have an 8x16 hoophouse in addition to the 4x8 growhiouse that I have now.

At least that is the plan at this moment.

 

[mickey328]

I know exactly what you mean! Trying to dig is an "adventure". We ended up getting a few yards of good, amended topsoil and tilled it in. It didn't really cost too awfully much and was an investment that has paid off in spades. We also got a small composter that doesn't take much room and put it next to the house on the south side; it's one of the kind that tumbles..so it processes compost pretty quickly. We got it started with some horse manure.

There's a lady here in Ft Collins who regularly posts on Craig's List: she has rabbits and gives away what manure she can't use...and that's absolutely the best manure there is. It's not "hot" so you can put it directly into the garden, right around the plants.

You can also make raised beds to grow in, adding a little "good" soil, peat moss, compost and such.

Really, I'd encourage you to keep at it...the more stuff you grow, the better the soil will become. The roots will help to break it up and as you till the dead plants back in, they add to it and sort of self compost.

You didn't mention what kind of things you want to grow...is it veggies for yourself, or perhaps some things to supplement your chicken's feed? Root crops in a home garden tend not to do very well unless the soil is amended a lot, ie carrots, beets, potatoes. We can get them to grow, but getting them out of the ground is another story...you pretty much have to dig them out. We do pretty well with tomatoes, green beans, squash, garlic, lettuce, cabbage...stuff like that.

You might consider putting in some alfalfa. It grows really well in our alkaline soil and is a nitrogen fixer as well. You can cut it repeatedly as long as you get it before it sets seed. Then after cutting it'll come back again and again. It is a good food crop for people and excellent for animals. After a year, or less, or more, you can till it all under and it will really help condition the soil as well.

HTH
Mickey

 

[kmatt87]

I know exactly what you mean! Trying to dig is an "adventure". We ended up getting a few yards of good, amended topsoil and tilled it in. It didn't really cost too awfully much and was an investment that has paid off in spades. We also got a small composter that doesn't take much room and put it next to the house on the south side; it's one of the kind that tumbles..so it processes compost pretty quickly. We got it started with some horse manure.

There's a lady here in Ft Collins who regularly posts on Craig's List: she has rabbits and gives away what manure she can't use...and that's absolutely the best manure there is. It's not "hot" so you can put it directly into the garden, right around the plants.

You can also make raised beds to grow in, adding a little "good" soil, peat moss, compost and such.

Really, I'd encourage you to keep at it...the more stuff you grow, the better the soil will become. The roots will help to break it up and as you till the dead plants back in, they add to it and sort of self compost.

You didn't mention what kind of things you want to grow...is it veggies for yourself, or perhaps some things to supplement your chicken's feed? Root crops in a home garden tend not to do very well unless the soil is amended a lot, ie carrots, beets, potatoes. We can get them to grow, but getting them out of the ground is another story...you pretty much have to dig them out. We do pretty well with tomatoes, green beans, squash, garlic, lettuce, cabbage...stuff like that.

You might consider putting in some alfalfa. It grows really well in our alkaline soil and is a nitrogen fixer as well. You can cut it repeatedly as long as you get it before it sets seed. Then after cutting it'll come back again and again. It is a good food crop for people and excellent for animals. After a year, or less, or more, you can till it all under and it will really help condition the soil as well.

HTH
Mickey

Thats one of the reasons why i miss having rabbits! I grew up raising them but we kind of inherited a dog that has a major grudge against rabbits. He would destroy the cages to get to them if we had one.
I have tomatoes, green beans, purple beans, tomatillos, zucchini,several variety of peppers, rhubarb (does fine), had some lettuce and sugar snap peas earlier in the season as well. The lettuce did fine, the peas ok (i think they had a bigger problem with the weather this yr than they did with the soil).....everything else is growing ok but not well enough to make it seem worth it. I've only gotten 5 tomatoes this yr, out of 9 plants! No tomatillos, maybe 6 zucchini, no beans, and very few peppers.
I have some garlic in a planter and that is doing fine. So is my basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley and lavender.

 

[mickey328]

Keep an eye on the free portion of Craig's List...she posts about once a month or 6 weeks. All you have to do is go fetch it, she's a really nice lady and has used the manure to pretty much completely "tame" her Colorado clay

Our tomatoes are usually touch and go. We have to regular sized plants and one grape tomato...the regular ones are producing slowly. The other one just exploded! It's covered with small, sweet, delicious tomatoes. Our zucchini and summer squash plants aren't huge and are a bit slow, but they're producing enough for us and the chickens. We had the best luck with tomatoes when we planted them up near the house on the south side; they love the heat. We pretty much used all the space there, though, so we moved them this year to let the soil near the house recover. We're looking at putting in a cold frame there this fall so we can grow some nice fresh greens thru the winter for us and the chickens.

We've got garlic growing all over the place! I had bought some that I didn't use and I had DH take the cloves and go stick 'em in the ground...I think they all took off...must be 30 or more plants out there. They're great for aphid control, so I definitely keep them all around my roses and fruit trees.

Most herbs don't seem to have an issue with our soil, you're right. As long as they get enough light and water, they seem to be pretty happy wherever ya put 'em, LOL.

 

[milo1108]

I would continue to try working with the soil. I live in Oklahoma but somehow got stuck with nasty clay dirt. It took me maybe 4 years to finally get a good garden starter. I dug a big trench in the garden area and then I started adding compost, peat moss, and soil to the mix and I'm finally getting some stuff growing. I never thought gardening would be such a workout.

 

[erinszoo]

It took us a number of years to get much of a garden going too ... but we finally resorted to using raised beds. We did that partly because our soil had a lot of clay in it too but also partly because our town used to have a zinc smelter and most of the town soil is polluted with fallout which we didn't want growing in our veggies. Without access to compost my suggestion is to start by adding sand and lime to your soil to get it looser and draining better. In the fall add whatever leaves you can rake up and throw on top of the bed and let it compost there over the winter, then in the spring work that in. If you can get your hands on a square bale of straw or hay, you can work that in too with the leaf cover. It may take a few years to get it really nice without spending a lot of money on additives but it will get there eventually. In the meantime I would try growing beans (they fix nitrogen in the soil and can grow almost anywhere and in anything), lettuce (which doesn't require much soil depth for it's roots), onions, potatoes (if you work some sand in first) ... other than that you could try growing tomatoes in just straight bags of compost, literally just slit open the bag of compost enough to plant the tomato in. Hope that helps.

 

[mickey328]

For sure gardening and soil conditioning is always a work in progress. We finally got our front yard in fairly decent shape. We took out all the sod, dumped some good topsoil on it along with compost, tilled it up and covered the whole thing with about 4 inches of mulch. After that really nasty storm this spring, the city cleaned up all the debris, chipped it and put it out in huge piles for us to help ourselves from...and boy, did we! I can hardly believe the difference it made. Even after several days of the icky heat we've had, you can go out there and pull back the mulch and the soil is moist underneath it! I put in 3 patches of oats this spring...was going to use them for herbal concoctions...then got the chickens and discovered they love them, so the plan changed. I'm cutting off just the tops for the girls to eat. Once the stalks are all dried, I'll cut them back to about 1'' and use them for bedding and the stubble is going to be tilled under...that'll add more organic material back in. This fall, I'm going to put in a few patches of winter rye and wheat, and do the same thing...more oats again in the spring. I'll rotate the crops of course but I figure it'll just get better and better each year for having all that good stuff in there. The patch of clover I put in is really doing well too. I've been cutting it for the chickens and had actually planned to just leave it but I think we may mow it all down this fall and dig it under too...great "green manure"

Back yard needs more work for sure. We took out a lot of the sod around the edges for borders and mixed in some topsoil and dumped a ton of mulch on it as well, so that's improving but still has a ways to go. The lawn part...well...when we did all this landscaping a couple years ago, we also planted some trees. Um...by "we", I actually mean DH, LOL. Since we had 5 of 'em to stick in, we rented a power auger. So...Dave's out doing the grunt work (bless him!), I'm in the kitchen doing something. I happened to look out the window and omg! Dave's a pretty good sized boy...6''1, about 250...and here he was...the auger blade was stationary in our lovely hardpan clay, and he's all but laying on top of the machine, spinning round and round. Wish I had that on video!

Once our garden has gone kaput, we're gonna put the chickens to it and let them dig and spread and fertilize it. Then we'll till in all that wonderful rabbit poo and whatever comes out of the composter. Then we'll mulch it heavily and I'm thinking it will be in much better shape come spring. Think we may try potatoes again. Since the soil is so hard to dig, we tried a couple of years ago to go up with them. Dave built a good sized box frame and we planted the spuds. As they came thru the soil, he'd put another board on the box and another layer of soil. The idea is that you keep going till it's time to harvest, then take the boards off and they sort of fall out with no digging. It did great...to a point! One day they were all doing great and the next they were all dead. We finally figured that the sun was just too hot and cooked 'em right in the box. Next year, I'm thinking we'll put some fence posts around the box and tarp them to keep the box in the shade while the potato plants can grow up into the sunlight. Can't hurt to try, right?