Can you rototill clay soil

Depending on how compacted your soil is, you could enjoy the fruit of your labor in just a couple of growing seasons. Rototilling soggy clay soil produces beds filled with clumps, which is not conducive to sowing seeds. Allow waterlogged soil to dry out before tilling. Test soil moisture by scooping up a handful of dirt and rolling it into a ball with your hands.

Wait a couple of days, then retest the soil moisture. When the balls falls apart easily from squeezing, the ground is ready to till. To make things easier, water the area to be worked with a garden hose and let it dry out for a day or two before tilling. The active ingredient in the vast majority of liquid aeration products is Ammonium Laureth Sulfate. Want to know where else you will find this magic elixir? Bubble baths and shampoos. Seriously, the same active ingredient in most liquid aeration solutions is found in your shampoo source.

In fact, the University of Colorado at Bouler specifically cites the benefit of Ammonium Laureth Sulfate as a wetting agent used to prevent resistance of water absorption in clay soil due often resulting from compaction source. There are people who swear by liquid aeration and those who call it snake oil. You can get the latest pricing and options on liquid aerators available from Amazon by clicking here.

This is another approach that, on its own, has limited benefit but when combined with other strategies can really make a difference in the quality of your clay soil.

Where most people seem to report the least effectiveness is when they simply spread a topdressing of organic matter over their clay soil. There is p otential for benefit here but you have to consider that you are simply laying one layer over the other. If the organic matter has no way of penetrating into the clay soil, it can only help so much. A better approach is to create a means for the topdressing to get down into the clay soil and integrate with it.

This is one of the benefits of tilling but, in our case, we want to avoid that. By aerating and removing plugs of soil, you create pockets where the topdressing can be raked in. Water it and test again every day until it is ready to till. Rent a tiller small enough to handle, extra weight will not help.

Use this opportunity to incorporate about four inches of compost into your clay. If you mulch twice a year with compost in three years you won't have to till your soil at all. That's what I am hoping to do soon I am on the 3rd year in this garden There is a period of about two or three weeks after the winter rains end when clay soil is in best condition for tilling.

After that, it will be too hard to till. The best tiller is a rear-tine tiller. With a rear tine you can put your weight on the handle and froce the tines into the ground. The front time models will just skip across. What I recommend is tilling in steps - an inch or two at a time per pass.

Most tillers have height settings for this. After tilling the clay soil, then layer on a few inches of organic compost and till that in.

Then let it sit. Add another few inches of compost every season and before long the clay will be more like loam. There are those who feel that no tilling is the best way to go. I still think it's very helpful to at least break up the clay at the right time and work a lot of compost into it the first year.

After that, maybe no-till will work just fine. I would also try digging few holes, about two to three feet deep, to see if there is any hardened soil layers under the surface. I would suggest composting with Starbucks free coffee grounds. Lasagna is a huge mess, and you have to wait a long time for it to be ready.

Hi- I'm new to this forum but not to gardening in clay. Ten years ago we moved about 10 miles from a place where I could dig down 12" with just my hands to a place where my yard becomes a slip 'n' slide when it rains.

I bought a tiller and all the gypsum and sand, etc. He also said to keep growing as much stuff as I could because the plant roots and worms would work the soil better than I could.

Ten years later there are spots in my veggie garden that I can dig down 8" with my hands. I gave up the tiller the third year because it was doing a better job than I could have done deliberately of tilling up weed and wild grass seeds and roots and killing worms.

A fork is probably the only tool you should be using in your heavy clay soil. A spade is said to seal the cut and wreck the little structure that clay is capable of. The other best thing you can do is start a compost pile.

Not only will it provide the best amendment you can use in your soil, but the worms will be working it 6" into the clay all the time it's cooking. Move your pile around each time you restart it and you're creating new prime planting spots. Then grow things with aggressive roots like potatoes, tomatoes and roses. It will take time but you can get good results in one area beginning the first year.

Good luck with it. Could you share why we should try to not own a tiller? I am debating whether or not to get an electric one that seems to get good review on HD: the Ryobi electric for just normal yard. But would definitely like to hear why you advise trying not to own one.. If you have not run a tiller on your soil, renting one first is good insurance that you really need or will use it once you own it.

This is especially true if you are considering an electric one. Have you thought about why are so few tillers electric? It's been indispensable for mixing the soil in our raised vegetable beds; it's saved me hours of back-breaking work. The guy at Lowes told me that it wouldn't work, that it didn't have enough power to claw thru the hardpan clay soil that we have here in Folsom.

You know what? He was right, but then again, I didn't have expectations that it would It's not heavy enough and it doesn't have the torque to cut thru the Bermuda Grass and clay sod that was in the area where our raised beds now lie.

But as Calistoga and Sudsmaster noted above, clay can be worked if the moisture content is right. Only then did we bring out the "garden cultivator" and used it to break up the clumps, remove the Bermuda rhizomes and eventually blend in loam and compost.

It worked very well for this purpose. As Troy-Bilt does, I refer to it as a "garden cultivator" and not a roto-tiller. I had a gas powered Sears roto-tiller once. It was a bulky, fume-spewing behemoth, that I'm convinced took a year off my life every time I used it.

Quite opposite of the effect that I was after by growing my own organic vegetables!! The main complaint that I have is that rocks of any size will freeze the tines up and I found that I had to stop often to use a cold chisel and hammer to knock them loose.

If you don't expect it to take the place of a real roto-tiller and use it for appropriate purposes, the "garden cultivator" can be a valuable tool Top 10 Reasons not to own a tiller: This soil tends to be porous and accommodating when it comes to plant growth, which makes it the ideal, but it is not as common as everyone would hope, especially in climates where forests are more common.

Sandy soil is arguably the worst type of soil as it will be nearly impossible to work with unless you choose to grow a select set of plants. Water retention in sand is almost zero, and this tends to make this soil type unsuited for any kind of agricultural activity. Finally, that leaves the last type of soil. Clay soil is strange in that it is capable of supporting some plants perfectly, including many varieties of trees which is why it is so common in forests , while others will be starved of nutrients.

Clay soil is a type of soil in which the predominant substance is clay, as you may have guessed from the name. While clay is more capable of supporting life than many people would believe when they think of the substance, it is still less optimal than soil that is rich in loam. As I already mentioned, clay soil tends to be perfect for the natural reproduction process of plants like trees, but when you try to make it work for your needs, it tends to be a little more resistant.