My soil is full of clumps of clay and I’m wondering if this is the answer. Any issues with using it?
I’m a soil scientist. I’ve never heard of this product, so I am highly sceptical. My understanding is that it’s a derivative from wood pulp, that aims to mimic humic acids.
Supposedly it can chelate (make some ions more labile and therefore prone to leaching). To me, that would seem like it would have the opposite effect of what you would want, assuming this is dispersion (and salinity) issue. Even if it is, you want to apply calcium and magnesium amendments
Why is your soil full of clay clumps? Is it compacted? Was it admixed->screened like often occurs in residential topsoils?
What issues are you having as a result?
I’m very much a beginner to this, so I don’t understand much of what you’ve said (although I appreciate the info and will do some googling). I’m renting, the house was built about 30-40 years ago and I don’t know what was done then.
There’s one garden bed in particular that’s full of lumps of clay. The soil is otherwise not too bad to dig, but the drainage seems fairly terrible. I’ve tried sowing seeds in there and very little germinates.
When you say amendments, would that be things like lime or gypsum, or fertilisers and soil improvers, or some other option I’m too much of a noob to know about?
Thanks so much for your help.
How big is the bed? If it’s a drainage thing, you could add a shitpile of peat or other fulffy organic matter to improve drainage. Mix it in with a rototiller really well.
If the beds are small and relatively shallow, you could dig it all up, put a layer of gravel down, and then place the soil back over top, essentially making a french drain. And excess water will slowly make its way through and into the gravel layer.
When I talk about amendments, Yes, you’re interpretation is right. I’m talking about things like gypsum, fertilizers, soil, improvers, biochar all kinds of crap like that. There’s a lot of stuff out there. Some of it snake oil some of it’s actually pretty good.
It’s pretty big, and due to budget and being carless, it will need to be dug by hand. Peat isn’t something I’ve seen where I am, are there other alternatives? Currently I’ve dug out all but the biggest plants and I’ve turned it into a compost pile (food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings). I figured I’d let that do It’s thing for a few months, then dig it in and add amendments. Gypsum and lime keep being mentioned, so probably those and some blood and bone or similar. I want to grow veggies and herbs there if it’s possible after all that.
I can get some products delivered from Amazon, if they sell useful amendments. Perhaps manure as well? I’ve gotten so much different advice, I feel like I’m just throwing everything at it lol. Doing something about the clay will make it infinitely easier to dig though.
Currently I’ve dug out all but the biggest plants and I’ve turned it into a compost pile (food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings). I figured I’d let that do It’s thing for a few months, then dig it in and add amendments
manure
That sounds pretty good, and will help. Improving organic matter content of the soil is what you want to do. Peat is good because it’s fluffy, and as result, has a lot of pore space. You could use straw, I suppose, or small sized bark chips, and thoroughly mix. Think fluffy soil.
Don’t mess with lime unless you’re sure your soil has low pH. Gypsum is good, since it’ll ad Calcium, which builds soil structure a bit, but it’s primarily used to treat saline soils.
Alright, sounds like I’ve got a plan then. Thank you so much for all your help, I really appreciate it!
Thanks for weighing in! I’m glad to know that my understanding wasn’t off the mark
You’ve got a pretty good understanding of soil of science
Aww thanks! That really warms the R horizon of my heart
I just planted a bunch of driller Diakon Radishes in my front yard to do some biological tillage on all of my clay soil.
Lots of info on YouTube about doing this.
I plan to leave most of them in the ground to compost, but I plan to pull some for eating.
The cool thing about them is that pull needed nutrients from deep underground.
This is what I bought: https://meritseed.com/driller-daikon-radish-annual/
Just thinking of the shape of Daikon radishes, this might work even better than the potato version, which is pretty great.
That sounds very promising, thanks for the info!
I’m unfamiliar with the product but a quick read through polylignosulfanates and their industrial uses caught my eye when it mentioned deflocculation - my understanding is that materials like gypsum increase flocculation of clay particles, causing them to have additional pore space. That process allows better penetration of water and humic substances in addition to plant roots. Maybe @Track_Shovel has some input; he’s a better dirtnerd than I.
I need to do some googling to understand exactly what that means, thank you for the info. That garden bed is just so bloody dense, with random lumps of clay and constantly damp.
It’s late (early?) here, so I read “my oil is full of lumps of clay…” I imagined you topping off your car’s oil tank with this, and was thinking “holy shit DO NOT do this!!!”
Never mind. Time for bed.
Check the ingredients, a lot of times it’s just soap / detergent. It does work. Some guy on YouTube experimented with it. Sorry, I forget the channel name.
It’s on the bottle: polylignosulfonates
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169131717305355
The lignosulfonate is the by-product of wood and paper processing industry, categorized under lignin based organic polymers, and normally considered a waste. It was found that, with increasing lignosulfonate content, the critical hydraulic shear stress of the treated dispersive soil samples increased, and the coefficient of soil erosion decreased
I’d use gypsum.
Would that be from a nursery or somewhere like a farm supply store? I don’t have a car, so it needs to somewhat portable.
In Australia it would be from a nursery or hardware dept store. Not sure about your location.
