Once the ground is damp you need to mulch clay soil to keep the soil open and with silty mud, you need to mulch the soil aka (silt mud) in my garden to open the soil.
For those of a certain age. who remember this 1950s light program.
I also garden on heavy clay and (7 years on) the soil is really starting to take shape.
The garden was a blank canvas so I have carved out borders from scratch. They all received lots and lots of spent mushroom compost (quite literally truckloads) and were dug and re-dug to break up the soil.
The soft fruit border has a very thick (5-6") mulch of pine nuggets (big chunks of pine bark) which do an excellent job of weed suppression, moisture retention and also provide a clean and dry surface to walk on to harvest the fruit. These nuggets have now been down for 2 seasons and will gradually breakdown into the soil - but, hopefully, will not need topping up for another year or two. They are there primarily as a mulch / path material rather than a feed / soil improver.
The other borders are dug or hand weeded many times over the growing season which keeps the soil nice and crumbly. It is noticeable that in the few areas where I can't / don't do it there are still thick clods of yellow and grey clay when I do put a spade in.
The beds get an annual 3 - 4" mulch of home made garden compost in late winter / early spring when the soil is damp. When the compost runs out (there's never enough!) I buy in a bulk load of combined soil improver and bark chippings from a local contractor. These chippings are much smaller than the nuggets (more like shreddings) and break down or are incorporated into the soil quite quickly.
Heaven is ... sitting in the garden with a G&T and a cat while watching the sun go down
Clay soil takes a few years of treatment to turn into loam. Actually clay ahs a lot of goodness locked way. Some great advice on this thread - especially manure - some farmers bag it for free. I just wanted to add that sharp sand is a help and that is cheap too, the sharp granules help prevent the clay from clumping - along with organic matter of course
Do you know what your soil PH is, Kat? That has a bearing on what type of organic matter it’s best to dig in/mulch with. Anything better than nothing, but if your clay is very alkaline, like mine, you wouldn’t want to pile on the mushroom compost.
Mountainous Northern Catalunya, Spain. Hot summers, cold winters.
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The garden was a blank canvas so I have carved out borders from scratch. They all received lots and lots of spent mushroom compost (quite literally truckloads) and were dug and re-dug to break up the soil.
The soft fruit border has a very thick (5-6") mulch of pine nuggets (big chunks of pine bark) which do an excellent job of weed suppression, moisture retention and also provide a clean and dry surface to walk on to harvest the fruit. These nuggets have now been down for 2 seasons and will gradually breakdown into the soil - but, hopefully, will not need topping up for another year or two. They are there primarily as a mulch / path material rather than a feed / soil improver.
The other borders are dug or hand weeded many times over the growing season which keeps the soil nice and crumbly. It is noticeable that in the few areas where I can't / don't do it there are still thick clods of yellow and grey clay when I do put a spade in.
The beds get an annual 3 - 4" mulch of home made garden compost in late winter / early spring when the soil is damp. When the compost runs out (there's never enough!) I buy in a bulk load of combined soil improver and bark chippings from a local contractor. These chippings are much smaller than the nuggets (more like shreddings) and break down or are incorporated into the soil quite quickly.