Adventures with water, clay soil and many stones

That project finally complete!
Squared up with the new soil mixture
Clay soil starts to dry a bit.
This is how the low spot looked in the first place.

It was 1992 and we were looking for a home lot on a lake. As a native of Minnesota, I yearned for a lake view, and we finally found the right place in northern Scott County.

It is a corner lot with a spacious yard, but in 1992 it was covered in weeds. Our first foray into the space was with our 2-year-old toddler daughter and an 18-inch lawn mower. It took hours to mow down the weeds.

After the house was finished in February 1993, I came up with main garden plans. A space out front would be the start, but I was in for a shock. The nice black soil we enjoyed in our Davenport gardens was not available at the new place. Instead we faced working in hard clay soil.

As reported several times by Alma Gaul of the Quad-City Times, homebuilders routinely remove the black soil during the building process and sell it elsewhere. Homeowners are left with the non-porous and horrible clay soil for the lawn and gardens.

A smart gardener suggested I simply get rid of the hard clay. "That's what I do," she said. In the 25-plus years we've lived here, we hauled away clay soil or buried it under a load of good black dirt that we purchased for this purpose.

The only clay soil I could find this year was in a low point of our patio area. This location is filled with small 'cobbie' stones that sit upon landscape fabric that needed to be replaced. The record rainfall this year meant this low spot collected an enormous amount of water. The project took several weeks:


1. In May, I started to remove the water collected. An estimated 75 gallons of water was ultimately hauled in buckets well away from the patio.


2. Several recent days were sunny and dry. I let the hard clay soil bake as much as possible in the sunshine.


3. Last week, I dug up several inches of the still damp and sticky clay soil and hauled it away.


4. I replaced that clay soil with a concoction of black soil, vermiculite, perlite, and peat moss. This I mixed up in the wheelbarrow and poured in the space. I covered it with new landscape fabric and piled in the cobbie rocks, one by one.


Clay soil might be amended by such items as perlite and vermiculite, according to garden experts. The peat moss will work in the short term, I have learned, so this exercise might have to be repeated in a few years.


It looks nice again. This area also happens to be located below bird feeders we stock in the wintertime, so it collects remains of the seed we use. Now it is all cleaned up.


The hope is the new soil mixture below the rocks will soak up water a little better than that hard clay, which is possibly the worst water collector known to gardeners.

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