If your garden soil has too much clay, it will clump together like paste when it's wet and turn hard as rock when there's a lack of rainfall. This can make growing flowers and vegetables a challenge. There are many ways to add amendments to clay soil to enrich it. One method is called growing green manure or living mulch. It'll change your clay soil so it's more open making it easier to till, plant and weed while adding nutrients.
Instructions
1. Till the clay garden soil with a rototiller in the spring. Plant half of the garden in alfalfa.
2. Sow 15 to 20 lbs of seed per acre--43,460 square feet. Do some measuring and math to calculate the number of pounds required for half the garden space. Sowing can be done by hand or put in a hand held seed spreader--a plastic bin with a handle and opening at the bottom. As the handle is turned, seed is spit out from the bottom of the bin. Lightly rake the seeds into the soil to set them after sowing.
3. Leave the alfalfa to grow until it starts producing flowers. Cut the alfalfa with a weed trimmer to a height of one inch above ground and leave the cuttings on the ground to decompose. This will add nitrogen to the clay soil.
4. Allow the alfalfa to re-grow. Cut the alfalfa down again at the end of the growing season and till the cuttings and crowns of the alfalfa plants into the soil. The crown is the part of the plant that emerges at ground level. The deep underground roots of the alfalfa plants will decompose too, which will add even more nutrients to the soil while naturally acting as compost to open up and loosen the clay soil.
5. Till the garden the following spring. Plant the area of the garden where the alfalfa was grown the previous season in flowers and vegetables. Plant alfalfa in the other 50 percent of the garden.
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