There is a rose garden along two sides and the soil in there, despite often removing of quantities and replacing with sandy loam, or bags of special soil, it gets hard in a short manner of time.
One winter about five years ago we had an early hard freeze so I went out with a sledge and iron bar and removed the top two inches from the entire rose garden. (I was replacing roses I had moved to another location the next spring)
I then, roto-tilled in a trailer load of sandy loam I had brought down from the St. Cloud area.
It is now so hard when I bury the roses they are buried under lumps of soil.
I put leaves over the buried roses as an extra layer.

Every thing grows well but one year it was so hard a borrowed rear-till tiller got stopped and I finally turned it over by hand.

I usually turn it over by hand in the fall leaving it looking like a plowed field.

Why does it get so hard?

I now use a front tine tiller.
Am I tilling it too fine?
I do it both directions and sometimes diagnolly also.

The garden is apprx. thirty by eighteen ft.

I am going to put in two to three four by eight trailer loads of sheep manure this fall but is there anything else I can add that will loosen it, especially the rose garden?
(I used to put Eucalyptus mulch in the rose garden but it has gotten too expensive and it seems that any mulch I put in there just turns into gumbo in a few years.
As an aside I highly reccomend the Eucalyptus mulch)

Organic matter helps to loosen heavy soil. For my clayey loam I really liked the results of adding 3 inches of coarse/medium sand with 4 inches of local peatmoss and deeply mixing all these together with the topsoil. It loosened the soil immediately and ever since.

I use one by sixs between most rows to walk on (I had a couple of dozen from a deck but they are wearying out)

I have never had the soil tested.
The soil I took off of the roses was put in one half of the garden, and beyond producing extremely good crops, that part of the soil is the loser area of the garden yet in the roses if you put a trowel or spade in the ground you get clumps usually as big as the digger or bigger depending on how deep one goes.

It seems the other side where potatoes and corn are usually grown, rotated, just got real hard, compared to what I was used to, in one apprx. eight by six area.

I usually turn the soil with a standard sand shovel after a mild freeze and yes in the spring that makes tilling much easier but the one area is noticelby harder as I can tell by how the tiller slows down.

I guess I will have to have the soil tested and I will not till as heavily as I used to.

One thing I did not say was in the smaller of the two rose gardens to try to get loser soil (it is apprx. 12 x 3) I dug the part that was the worst down about one two feet,and replaced it with sandy loam from up north.

I did notice that after a certain depth, the soil became noticelby looser.
I had a pile about four feet around by two feet deep at the point.
It was late in the fall and I left the pile sit all next summer.
I planted pumpkin in the middle and they did very well.
Anyway this is one reason I have roto-tilled as deep as the tiller would go.
My new old used Simplicity sadly died but I would easily till very deep. If it got too deep I would simply reverse my way out.
Ny new new Ariens is not half the machine that Simplicity was.

I have chopped my corn stalks into apprx. one foot bits and turned that in by hand, I usually bury my potatoe vines,I pull weeds by hand and bury them.--(I have put seventy five percent of the garden into corn at times, including stalks that get 12 to 15 feet high. Recently I will chop about half and save the rest for a halloween corn shock.
Apprx eight years ago, I put coco beans five inches deep across an area about eight by six feet to control weeds so I think the organic level, at least in most of the garden is fairly decent, but that is just an opinion.)
Now in the area directly next to the worst spot, I took the above pile, moved it there and planted on top of the raised area.
I grew pumpkins and squash there, then the next spring I roughly spread out the raised area so the garden was mostly level again and the potatoes I grew there were easier to dig than they had been before I moved new soil there.

About five years ago, again to contrl weeds, I put straw between rows and over the area not planted about four inches deep.
I was gone for weeks at one point, and when I came back it looked like I had planted a wheat field.
I pulled the wheat from between the rows but simply turned the rest over with a shovel.
It probably would have been more helpful to do it when it was still green rather than wait till it was ripe. (I cut some for my sig. other to use in fall displays)
This area is now where the soil seems to be the worst.

I hate putting leaves and straw into the soil as my dad used to say it makes the garden into a clumpy slimey mess.
I found this out first hand several years ago when I took the leaves and straw off of the roses and simply roto-tilled them into the garden.
I don't know maybe that was what caused it but I figured by now it would have fixed itself.
In the rose garden I do walk and maybe that is the simple problem there.
I usually work in the garden barefoot, is that good or bad?
The one is big enough one has to walk in to work on the center roses.

I guess I will just have to have it tested, and work a trailer load of composted soil in the worst area.

One other item, although it has been over forty years, one major component of hardest part of the garden is genuine coal bits and coal dust, that covered the botton of the coal bin, that was dumped in the garden area when a cement floor was put in, from the old horse barn that was cut down into a garage.
Thanks for the answers.

2) Drainage. Dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains� too quickly and needs more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up.

3) Tilth. Take a handful of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a finger that clump should fall apart.

4) Smell. What does your soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria will be and the nicer your soil will smell.

5) Life. How many earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that is not healthy.

You don't want composted soil. You want just plain compost or just organic matter. The soil you are adding is making the problem worse. If the soil you add is clay that is just adding more clay, if it is sand, it bad to add sand to clay.
You may even consider removing some of the soil to make room for more organic matter.

I have two gardens fifty miles apart and the hard one I will get to next week.(The one I tilled today is the sandy loam one, plus twenty years of added orgainic matter, that has contributed soil to the hard one at times)
At this, soft garden, I can literally dig potatoes by hand.

If one digs below the black dirt of the hard garden,genuine yellow clay is under it averaging sixteen or so inches down.

I do have a fifty pound bag of green sand and a fifty pound bag of humic acid at the hard garden site.
How much should I add to an eight by eight area that is the worst spot?

I will do that jar test and see what pans out.
The dirt smells like dirt and will clump when squeezed, although I have never done this from the worst spot, and while not really fall apart, if you poke it, it will at least break in half.

I did the drainage test when I was worred the roses might be drowning and most of it passed but one area had me worried so that is the area where I replaced the top two feet of soil.

Now the earth worms thing, well, sometimes I have a lot of worms in a garden shovel full(I have a lot of night crawlers, enough that the lawn is often full of them at night. If you walk barefoot you can feel them moving underfoot sometimes) yet sometimes few to none come up in shovel full of dirt.

After the bad experience I now always composted the leaves and straw from the roses, or use them to cover potatoes that are either buried shallow or simply laid in a trench.

The garden is over fifty years old, and I will use all the help you have given me to get the worst spot back in shape.

Thank you very much.

Contact the humate company and get their recomendations for the bad areas and your soil type.

I read pretty fast through this thread but I don't think all your organic additions have made the problem worse. You just have a really troublesome clay. I agree with the advice to till less, build compost piles on your garden (and/or use compostables as mulch around your plants), and never dig when it's wet.

Have you talked with your county ag extension? They might have some specific advice for your local soil.

Loam, which is an ideal soil we'd all like to have, has sand, silt and clay and a good dose of organic matter.

Organic matter will help, but with clay, you have to keep adding it forever or the texture goes right back to its worst. If the texture of the mineral portion can be improved by changing the particle size distribution, the improved texture will be more lasting.

No matter what soil type you have, sand, silt, or clay, adding sufficient quantities of organic matter is the only thing you can do that will make that soil into a good, healthy soil that will grow strong and healthy plants.

Kimmsr, I would feel better when reading your posts if they were not so dogmatic.

How about, "Adding sufficient organic matter is the most important thing you can do that will make that soil into a good, healthy soil that will grow strong and healthy plants."

;-)

Lloyd

And I know I'm right about that. :-D

I am kind of starting to think that replacing my fifty plus years old genuine Roto-Tiller tiller with a newer model was a bad idea.
The old one took hours longer to use but it left bigger chunks in the garden.
I still have it but use it in my other soft garden.

We had, had light rain so the top eigth inch was wet, but under it at time I had dust.
It tilled a little easier than I though but maybe because I was not struggling through wet soil.
In the expected hard spot it wanted to run-away on me acouple of times , but even that broke-up a little easie than the year before.
Although it was really too dry for good planting it was near ideal condtions working in the garden not having to worry about clumps of soil sticking to the tools and shoes.

The worst area is still unplanted so I will amend that before I plant there.

One thing I noticed is that the garden soil is now more of a dark, dark brown when not wet; whereas the rose soil is just plain black, or charcoal grey when it is not wet.

Roaes, looked good even though under their blanket it was probably too warm and at least the top cover should have been removed two-weeks ago.
I lost, or think I lost, I mean cannot find, not died, a rose but I will not know for sure untill a rose bud pops up out of nowhere.
I am done with burying the roses. In that black-gumbo it is just plain misery to dig them up in the spring.

In the past five years, I have lost, died, so many roses that the gaps between them is large enough I may dig out the dirt between them. Put it in the vegetable garden and take the best soil from the vegetable garden and put it between the roses.
I do not know if it will help, but it cannot hurt.

We had a couple of inches yesterday, so everything in the ground should be well off now.

About hard soil, the easy way to deal with this, make some homemade compost. If you don't have enough add bagged browns. Then mulch the area with the homemade compost. Water well, wait about two weeks. Then turn the top layer of soil, but not too deeply. I just turn it by hand. Rototillers kill the earthworms. Water a second time. Then re mulch again with homemade compost or bagged browns. Repeat the process again as many times as you can or want. Each time you will notice the soil is easier to turn. But rototilling in sand is not going to help, it will only make things worse. I don't think rototilling helps at all. The soil just goes hard again. Only if you add more OM is it going to get softer. Yes, turning and rototilling creates air space in the soil, but it will only compact again. When your soil is in good shape you can re plant the roses. It is better to do the soil prep first before planting. Once roses are planted you can't really improve the soil very much under them. You can only improve the top layer slightly.

I move plants around a lot and I been through many roses over the years. It is a process. I think your roses could have bad drainage, but there could be something else wrong like a disease or a virus. That is why you can post photos to the rose forum and they may be able to come up with some more ideas.