Help... Soil In Yard Is Clay Like. Growing Your Own Herbs Vegetables

Help... Soil in yard is clay like.

jencathen 16 years ago

Okay this is the first year that I've tried a garden here in Texas. I just moved here a year ago. The soil consistency is very clay like. I have a nice area on the side of the house that gets great sun, but tilling up the soil the texture is horrendous. What should I do or can I still plant in that condition.

Right now my tomato plants are just in containers, but they aren't doing as well as they usually do because I've always had them in the ground before.

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smittenmoose 16 years ago said:

You could make square foot garden beds. Make a 4 foot square box . Get 12 X 1 X 16ft board Cut them into 4 foot lengths and nail them together. Place them in the sunniest spot and fill them with a mix of 1/3 peat, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 compost. Then plant. No digging, no tilling.

I got this from square foot gardening website.

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thepiggs 16 years ago said:

I also like the idea of the small beds, with good soil. My concern for this in Texas is that it might be a bit too hot and dry for that good soil. Even though it should hold moisture in most climates, I think the Texas weather might be a bit too much for it, especially since it's not getting to the point where it will only be hot, until fall.
If you think this idea will work for you, I would make sure you have a good, thick mulch of straw or clippings, leaves, etc., around your plants, to help cool and hold in the moisture.
Another thought on this box garden, I think you might need it have it deeper, as your ground is so hard. 12" is a good depth but since the ground is almost unworkable, you might want something a bit deeper, so the tomato roots can go down further, since they do like to grow deep.

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jencathen 16 years ago said:

I"m going to try the suggestions you guys made. I have the perfect wood for it already because I had a box around a tree and it was taking up to much space so we disassembled it. I'll use it to make the square foot garden.

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pointsevenout 16 years ago said:

Whether you make an elevated framed flower/garden bed or dig up the ground with a backhoe and add soil modifiers, the ground needs to drain or the plants will drown. In my minds eye I see a waterlogged garden area that doesn't drain because the ground below and surrounding it is hard caleche. Water has to run off of caleche. It does not soak into the ground. The dirt and rocks are so compressed together that it is impossible to manually dig it.
I lived in Arizona for a lot of years and we had very hard dirt too. When the contractors come in to landscape the housing properties using what is a low water maintenance landscaping called "zerisape", they bring a lot of decomposed granite to blend into the ground. Once the ground is modified to a depth of a couple of feet with the decomposed granite a lot of stuff will grow, the ground is easy to work, and you can add other modifiers easily too. I was forever trying to kill unwanted grasses and weeds from my front yard because it was supposed to be a desert landscape in the summer that transformed to a lush green winter rye grass in the winter. Got a lot of use out of my "hoop hoe" during the summer, beating back the weeds.

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pointsevenout 16 years ago said:

Guess what I was trying to convey is that you have to design in a drainage system for whatever it is you are going to build for your garden area so that the plants will not drown when the rains come. And the rain does come in buckets in Texas.
I lived in El Paso for a few years and it rained once a year every year for 3 days in the third week of June or July, I forget which. That's the rainy season. The water would come ripping down the Franklin Mountains, undermining and tearing up all the unpaved roads leading away from the mountains and into the downtown area. All that water would come together at Dwyer Street, which is the main downtown artery street and flood southward to the Rio Grande. Being a young flatbelly back in those days, a group of us would go down to the main street to push people out of the water for a little extra income. The stupids would see water coming at them but continue to drive their cars which got flooded out and stalled. Don't think the stupids realized they could be washed away and end up dead, drowned in their car in Mexico. Year after year the scene repeated.
Well here I go again, getting long winded. Just remember to drain your garden. Morton salt says: "When it rains it pours" How true in El Paso of Texas.

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