i have very bad clay soil. it goes hard as a rock and its hard for water to get to the roots and it restricts growth on my plants.
I went to the nursery and they gave me some mixture of gypsum/soil conditioner etc to mix through the soil which i have done a couple of weeks ago and there isnt much imrovement, i am told i would have to repeat this every 6 months, this is really back breaking work. would it be worth getting rid of all the old soil and putting some new one in?


My heart's crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing

Go ahead. Make things simple for yourself.

I live in Arizona and we have clay and rocks for the most part and had the same problem....

I had to dig down about 18 inches remove all the dirt and replace it with a 4 to 1 mixture of soil and original dirt it works great in my flower beds......now if I could keep the @#^$ rabbits away....


"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a
politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

Harry Truman

we have clay also..............each spring we turn up all of the garden clay soil and put topsoil on top.


got a face job done, like it?

It takes time to get good soil and yeah, it's a lot of work to make it happen, but the results are well worth it.

Do you have a compost bin? If not, you need to get one started, the more organic material you add to the soil the easier it will be to improve it.

You can remove part of your clay type soil and add a layer of compost and some top soil to get you started this year. However, for next year, if you start building your own compost now, you can add as you go along. It will help encourage worms to come and they will help aerate your soil, break apart your clay and eventually you will have rich black humus.

I am thinking of starting to compost this year.



My heart's crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing

Try using raised flower beds. You can use landscape blocks to build up the bed and then you wouldn't even have to worry about the clay.


EARTH FIRST! We'll strip-mine the other planets later.