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clay nutrients
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Posted by
tim45z10 sdca (
My Page) on
Sun, May 6, 12 at 2:05
| Are there any nutrients in compacted clay? I wanted to dig it out and I wonder if I can crush some, screen it and reuse it. |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: clay nutrients
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| Could be, or not much. "clay" covers a lot of ground, so to speak. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| Clay is known to hold tightly to nutrients, but the addition of organic matter changes the chemistry and causes those nutrients to become available to plants. Whether grinding clay would do the same thing is an unkown but if it would work I would suspect that someone would already have done that. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| The compaction is the problem, not necessarily the clay. there are.exceptions to this, but in general, to have clay is beyter than to not have clay. it is a nutrient rich and chemically active soil that holds water well. in all my years of working in horticulture and agriculture i have only ever seen one site where the clay was truly horrible (former brick factory). and i used to live in fargo, where we onve had a golf course built by a company that specialized in building golf courses...they swore they would never come back what they described as a fod forsaken place, the river valley clay is so...well, all those things that people like to complain about with clay. and if i read something by some so called expert wherebthey complain about clayn..yeah, that's enough of that. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| "Clay" covers a lot of ground ;) Generally, clay has the ability to hold nutrients and "exchange" them when needed by the plant. There are exceptions to this. Some old clays are depleted of nutrients and pretty much worthless for agriculture. What you're proposing seems like a lot of work. But if I was so compelled I would dry it, screen it to < 1/8" and mix it 50/50 with pine bark fines. This would make a good soil conditioner for sandy soils. However, if you're going to just mix it back into your clay soil, I don't see much benefit in "harvesting" the clay. In that case, I'd just use bark fines as a soil conditioner. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| I sure agree that clay is better than not having any, speaking from the experience of totally not having any in multiple soils in two quite different climates. |
RE: clay nutrients
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"crush some, screen it and reuse it"
you can but it will compact again. My yard is all clay. I hate it. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| Best bet is lots of organic matter. Coffee grounds, compost, anything to get the worms to help out. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| Break the clay up into pebble size pieces and then add it and water to a garbage bin and turn it into a slurry. The slurry can be added to the garden or compost. This works much better than dealing with dry clay. |
RE: clay nutrients
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| If only all the clay, silt, and sand in the world had been evenly mixed, huh? And then if it would rain lightly every night and be sunny each day..... |
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