>I lived on Vancouver Island in Sidney, British Columbia for 10 years. I had
>clay so hard that a potter friend said it could almost be used as is with no
>cleaning. After breaking a construction shovel digging in my clay, I had some
>success by covering my garden with over a foot of seaweed each winter. I
>collected buckets of seaweed on the beaches and because it was always raining,
>salt was not a problem. The alginates in the seaweed softened the clay and I
>grew wonderful vegetables. You would have to grow annuals for a while to
>condition the soil before growing perennials. It takes a lot of seaweed over
>many years to soften the clay. Compost and manure help too.
If I dig down a couple of feet, I find that sort of thing, too. I had to
replace my sewer line shortly after we bought our place (This was before I
started doing pottery and before I'd really begun to do much with rock
gardening.). I found that the top 6" or so was largely organic. The foot
below that was a stiff, brownish clay-loam that was mostly mineral, but with
enough organic content to make it good and friable when damp. Below that,
there were a few inches of dark-ish more clay-ey stuff and then an abrupt
change to this light-grey, gooey stuff that stuck to everything and was more
slippery than snot.
All of my rock-gardens are above-ground features--berms and raised beds.
Ordinary perennials and many PNW natives grow just fine in the existing soil.
I have the benefit of having an old house, instead of one of those new housing
development models built on a scraped-clean, super-compacted, downright raped
site. So my soil's in good shape both in structure and micro-fauna.
Many a gardener has been told by some expert or other that such-and-such
wouldn't work or wouldn't grow. If it were not for those who tried it anyway,
we'd all be much the poorer in the scope of all of our gardens.
-Nathan Miller
Newberg, OR Zone 8-ish
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