I live in uplands with clay, and I envy some of my friends down in the river bottom with silt. It drains better so things don't get waterlogged in the cold wet spring/early summer. We lose plants to that.

You can't dig it when it's wet or it makes clods. So early spring planting of seeds is difficult.

When it dries it's hard as rock. Can't even pull out an onion once it gets hot and dry.

Hard to even grow root crops in it - the carrots, taters and such are stunted and twisted.

It does suck up organic matter so as soon as you stop adding, the texture starts to go back to heavy clay.

Those are the major ones. :-] I'm sure every soil has its pros and cons, but I think I'd be happy with some nice rich black silt.

Here's a new garden space my neighbors and I created in an empty lot on our street. There's no top soil here. What you see is pure clay. The lush topsoil that used to exist in this old cattle field had been scooped up and sold by developers years ago when our houses were built. :(

From 070410

It's an injustice to future homeowners when developers do this, but it was explained to me that they are the lowest bidder to clear land and to make any money they take 95% of the top soil and sell it to golf courses. This is why everyone on our street has such a hard time maintaining a green lawn.. as there's less than a centimeter of topsoil underneath the sod that is laid for each lawn and when the grass roots grown into that soil they encounter the clay\limestone and have a difficult time penetrating it and finding nutrients.

I have had to haul in probably 10 cubic feet of compost and mulches over the years that I buy in bulk to add to my tiny yard to have the best success growing a vegetable garden. I bought a tiller this spring and it has really helped integrate the clay with this great compost, so the silty soil I desire is taking shape in the oldest areas of the garden. Plants definitely appreciate the effort.

And another option I'm trying this year is to dig in large volumes of wood chips. I dug a bed 1.5' deep and then mixed in about 20% wood chips as I refilled the bed with the grey/brown heavy clay soil.

So far both hugelkultur and the "woodchip" beds are doing great, the first season I've had a decent garden in my yard.

It is a lot of upfront work, hopefully it will just become a no-till garden in future years. Also it does take more liquid organic fertilizer than normal to keep the plants green. Harvest is going strong, more veggies than we can eat.

A huggle what-ur? I know not of what you write but suspect it is of German origin, jawohl?

Rain

If I had it to do over again from scratch, I would take the slow approach: choose an area for a raised bed and make a compost pile or lasanga bed on it (if there was extra soil available, or using a little purchased topsoil). Let it cook and add to it for a year, or maybe even two, before turning over and planting. Worms will find it during that time and they and the rest of the Soil Food Web will do a lot of the work for us.

We are in a new subdivision with the standard sod on top of topsoil free/removed clay fill dirt. I initially tried to just add good amounts of mulch and amend the individual planting holes... it seemed to work okay.. but during the dry summers the ground would crack and I would get the bathtub effect in some of the planting holes would loose some plants... and of course the water bill was high.

So for the past few years I pick a section of bed, remove all the plants to the side, and then double dig it. I remove the worst of the clay/fill dirt and then heavily amend the remaining clay with either compost/manure and now just pure leaf mold. I even break up the bottom of the bed with the spud bar to minimize the bathtub effect. I then mulch with free shredded leaf mold which makes the soil nice and dark too. The worms don't seem to hibernate in their little worm balls like they do in the unamended clay.

It's a ton of work up front, but I figure it will only need to be done once and after I can just added amendments to the surface. And you can obviously just deeply amend small sections at a time... so you don't break you back.

It has been well worth the effort. The deeply amended beds vs the old beds are doing great, even in the horrible heat and drought we have been having this year.

For my gardens I have added lots of leaves and compost. This spring I moved my compost piles. Like kimmser said, where I had compost piles last year, the soil is workable and nutritious.

I agree that it is ridiculously heavy work, but if you add about 12" of organic matter to the 12" of clay ....... gardening will be a lot easier.

Weed pulling becomes easy. Watering becomes easy. Fertilizing isn't even really required for a couple of years after it is done for great growth (assuming the organic matter was very nutrient rich like dairy manure).

Previously growing was so difficult (even when adding soil into each hole I tranplanted a veggie) that I built and ammended my garden way too big.

Now that it is done - I realize I only needed half as much space to grow enough veggies/potatoes/herbs to satisfy my family and friends (zucchini and cucumber in particular grow very large).