How I Revived My Heavy Clay Garden Soil! *Plus a $100 Giveaway!*

The soil you see here looked nothing like this three years ago when I first started this garden. Instead, it was the nastiest, the densest, the most compacted, heaviest clay soil that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. And I'm not even about to lie to you, discouraged doesn't even begin to explain how I felt about taking it on. However, I had a promising vision of the type of soil that I believed that I could have. And by staying focused on that incredible payoff that the future soil would bring, I was able to stay patient, endure, and learn through the struggles, and persevere. Because I stayed true to that process, I was able to take that dirt and nurse it into a healthy, unrecognizable, rich, dark soil. And I'm going to show you exactly how I did it. If you get nothing else from this video, get this right here. Faith was the number one, most important step to accomplishing these incredible results. It's the most important step to accomplishing any valuable result in any area of your life for that matter. It's the foundation. If humans were to be classified as superheroes, our defining superpower would be faith. I mean just a mustard seed amount of it can move a mountain. That sound like a superpower to me. Can you guess what our kryptonite would be? It would be doubt. If you see something that is good and desirable to have, but you doubt in your ability to get it, you're never even going to take the first step to obtaining it. And if you do start, but you lose sight of what it is you're after, and you back down due to the hardships that come on the path to obtaining that thing, you're going to fizzle out and you're going to quit. If you want to know how the process of faith works so that you can get these incredible soil results, go back, play the second half of the intro again, and listen carefully. And after you've done that, listen even more carefully to this example of how someone infinitely greater than I demonstrated that process for us. Looking unto Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now set at the right hand of the throne of God. Didn't think you'd be getting a little mini sermon today, did you? Now after my faith was founded, I was on the hunt for the second most important thing. That thing was organic matter, organic matter, and even more organic matter. Why? Because early in my gardening experience, I learned that no matter what the base soil type is, whether it be sand or silt or clay, in order for it to be considered a healthy soil, it had to contain at least 5% organic matter. I had also learned that the more diverse the organic material was, the better it is for the soil conditions. So that was my priority. Getting a hold of as many different types of readily available organic material as I could. It was the fall season when I was doing this, and leaves were in an abundance. So I happily drove around the city and literally was just taking leaves from off the side of the road that people were throwing out. Literally taking one man's trash and turning it into another man's, mine, treasure. Now after I gathered up all those leaves, I started reaching out to local tree services and asking if they had any wood chips that they would be willing to drop off to me. And I also checked with the city to see if they had any type of wood chip or mulching site where I could go pick some up. Turns out that my city did have it, so I was able to go pick up truckloads of wood chip mulch for like $5 for truckload. I mean it was a great deal, incredible deal. I was also blessed enough to have access to literal tons and tons of raw, partially composted and fully composted horse manure. I want to issue a very quick but extremely important caution. If you have access to cow manure or horse manure or any type of manure for that matter, you have to, have to, have to vet your sources. Check with your supplier and make sure they're not spraying any of the fields that their animals are grazing on with any type of fungicide or broadleaf herbicide. And then also if they're getting feed, they're getting hay or straw from a different supplier, check with their supplier and make sure that they aren't spraying the same stuff on their fields. If they are, do not use that manure. Don't do it. It'll pass through the animal, it'll stay in they poop and when you spread it out on your garden, it'll go into your garden and you won't be getting anything out of there. Trust me. Do not say, I didn't warn you. I also want to note that these were the organic materials that were the most readily available to me. See, all organic material breaks down and turns back into soil. So whatever organic material is most readily available to you, whether it be straw or hay, grasses, compost, leaves, wood chips, whatever, if it's one of those things or if it's all of those things, use it. Whatever you have easy access to. Now once I had gathered up all of these organic materials, it was almost time to start applying them. I say almost because I committed the greatest sin in all of no-till gardening. I tilled. AHHHHH! Now I don't believe that I actually needed to till and frankly I think it was a waste of time, a waste of money, and honestly may have done more harm than good, but let me tell you why I did it. The reason to not disturb the soil or not to till is so that you don't destroy the soil life, right? Well, guess what? There was no soil life to destroy. All of the organic matter layer and topsoil in that area got scraped right off. It was a new build. So I was just left with this thick, nasty, heavy, dead clay subsoil. It was nothing there. So I tilled in a little bit of horse manure so I could get some organic matter and a little bit of life back into that dead soil. And if you know why I think it was a waste of time and money and actually may have done more harm than good, drop me a comment and I'll make another video on it because that's a whole other topic in and of itself. After that little bit of tillage that I did, it was time to start layering those organic materials as a mulch. And I started with the horse manure and I laid about three to four inches of that down first. And can you see my face? I can still smell it. For real. After I put the manure in place, I then started to apply all of those leaves that I had collected. And I want to note that before I applied the leaves, I put them into a trash can and I blended them up really, really tiny with a weed whacker. I did that so that the rate of decomposition would be sped up exponentially. If you want a full tutorial on the how and why I did this with the leaves, you can check out this video that I did here a couple of months ago. Once all of the leaves were applied, they were about eight to ten inches deep. Now if I could go back, I probably would have aimed for a foot to a foot and a half deep because the leaves will compress down to roughly half, maybe even a little bit less than half of that original depth. And after I put the leaves down, I went ahead and applied about four to six inches of woodchips. And other than just adding more diverse organic material to the garden, I put them down to keep the leaves from blowing all over the place and off into the neighbor's yards and everything, who frankly don't know what they're missing out on. Also, dealing with the devil's minions that reside inside of my parent's HOA wasn't very high up on my to-do list either. Who knew woodchips covered more than just the soil? Quick note if you didn't know this already, but don't till any of the brown materials into the soil. Don't till in the woodchips, don't till in leaves, those just act as a mulch. If you're going to till anything, just till in the compost or till in some manure and then mulch on top of that, but don't till in that high carbon stuff. You can if you don't plan on using that area for a garden for a couple of years, then you can go ahead and do it. But yeah, don't do it if you plan on gardening in it very, very soon. But anyway, just like that, I had set the stage for the transformation of my soil. All I had to do now was stay patient and let time and the soil life go ahead and do their thing. Now, I still wanted to be able to garden and grow things during that period that the soil was improving, so this is what I went ahead and did. I took some 2x6s from Lowe's and I built some 4 foot by 10 foot long garden frames. I should have put them in before I put all of the organic material down because I had to rake aside all the mulch and leaves and stuff so I could place these frames into the ground. So, if you're going to do this, build your frames and put those in first. But I wanted them to be in ground frames, I didn't want to have raised beds. Raised beds will work fine, I just don't like them because I don't want to have to spend money to fill them up. So I just set them in the ground so that they were flush with the top layer of mulch. And once those frames were in place, I just went ahead and filled them up with some composted horse manure and then I planted directly in those and grew from there. I basically did my growing in like a hybridized type method, right? I had perennials, like blueberry bushes, elderberry bushes, and fruit trees growing in the areas that I mulched and then I had my annuals growing in the compost in these garden frames that I built and put in. That ended up working fantastically. It actually ended up working so well that at that particular garden location, that's just how I'm going to continue growing there. I'm going to keep growing my perennials in the mulch and I'm going to keep growing my annuals in these in-ground beds of compost. What I like is options though. So now that the mulch area has decomposed well enough, I'll be able to plant annuals in those mulched areas as well. I'm not just confined to growing in these beds. Yeah, now here we are three years later and these are the results of adding those organic materials to the soil. They have broken down and turned this nasty, heavy clay soil reminiscent of potting clay and turned it into a rich, dark, healthy soil. Now I actually posted a video probably about two months ago where I'm testing deep mulch methods where essentially I'm just layering organic materials in different ways to see which one will create healthy soil the fastest. This layering method, the manure, then the leaves, then the wood chips, is actually one of the competitors in that experiment. So if you've seen that video and you're waiting on the results of it, you just got the answer for the time frame of this particular layering process. If you haven't seen that video, go check it out so you can see what the other two competitors are and then stay tuned to see if they can beat the three year time frame of this current method. If you've made it to this point in the video, I appreciate you more than ever. And to show my appreciation, I want to do a giveaway. The giveaway is going to be a $100 gift card to any outdoor or gardening store or website of your choice, or you have the option of just getting a $100 Visa card. All you have to do to enter is like the video, subscribe, and then leave me a comment. It can be a positive comment, it can be a negative comment, hey, I'm all for free speech. And then drop, you know, some type of idea or some type of video, it has to be gardening related, some type of video topic that you would like to see me cover at some point in the future. I'll announce the winner in the next video, which will be January 21st, plan on posting every other Sunday. So stay tuned to see if you went ahead and won that prize. I look forward to seeing you down in the comments. Till next time, I'll catch you then. Peace.