Hard ground!

Where we live the soil underneath seems to be mainly compose of clay and it is very hard to penetrate with a pitchfork. We need to plant some plants that we bought yesterday and need to go down at least a foot, however 6 inches seems to be the max before hitting the hard clay and it is really hard.

As it is a border area along a fence and is approximately 2 foot wide and slightly sloping. Another thought was to sort of terrace it which means using 6" wide planks or boards to contain or border the new soil or compost to keep it contained. Doing this will give us the depth.

Is there an easier way to break up the clay or is the plank idea the better option? If boards, as they will be constantly wet holding in the soil what sort of boards should we use? Thanks for any advice as really struggling at the moment.

 

Really you need to break up the subsoil, its hard work but would pay dividends.

You really need to do the whole border not just where you want to plant.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, sorry.

 

I have all the necessary tools i.e. pitchfork, pick etc, but unfortunately not the body to handle them for any length of time. However the daughter has one of those small hand rotavators that you push along so not sure if that will help.

Probably best for us to do one section at time using the pick to penetrate the subsoil if the rotavator cannot cope? . If we are able to manage breaking up the subsoil, we are not sure if we should mix the newly bought compost soil with the broken up clay or just add it on t.

 

Well, you would probably be best breaking it up and then using your new soil to plant into, so not really mixing, but if some does get mixed it wont hurt.

 

Maintain the plants which I expect are in pots, as you purchased them. They will be as likely to survive as if in the garden centre. This removes urgency.
I agree with @pete, proper preparation will pay dividends. How extensive this needs to be depends on your future plans.
At a minimum, create holes big enough to be double the size of the pot in height/diameter.
Remove top soil and place aside for refilling. Fill the hole with water and watch while it dissappears. (If longer* than 15 mins, retire for a drink!) It will soften the clay so that you should be able to dig out to the depth required (2 pot depths) Discard to elsewhere. *Cut a channel to the down hill side. According to plant type, introduce organic material, leafmould/compost/peat and/or good top soil. Firm with boot. Soak the pot and plant, firming as you refill with top soil.Flood in and refirm.Back fill the channel with free draining material Continue to water while plants establish, weekly while no rain.

 

Thank you for some excellent advice and will try the suggestions even if I end up having a mud bath. LOL!.

 

You have my sympathy. My soil is the same. It also has the added bonus of stones (not gravel), big stones. A fork is no use, neither is a spade, I use a 6 feet long wrecking bar to break up the soil and hoick out the rocks. I also need to saw to sever the roots of the trees from around the garden.
I also dig out the top 6 inches which are softer and then fill the hole with a bucket of water. Once that has soaked away digging may be easier. Add as much organic material to the hole as you can before planting and then turn the top soil to mud again.
Infradig has it just right

 

You won't get anywhere at all with a pitchfork, and it'll probably break. You need a proper digging fork. You could try a Bulldog metal trench fork ("BUL5TFAM") which is on offer at the moment, but any proper fork would do. You can break them if you just push them in and try to lever out a huge lump, so start off loosening up one small area, go down in increments maybe until you've got depth, and then go along the border allowing the hard soil to break into the softer bit you started with, and continue along. A proper spade might be better to start digging with. How's your technique? You can place the blade of the spade, hold the handle, put one foot on and push the blade in, then use your other foot too and use your whole weight to push the blade in. A mattock will be a lot better than a pick, especially if there are roots. Bulldog also sell those (as do Toolstation, etc). Again, just try to chip away at the hard stuff in stages, rather than trying to dig up great clods and it will be easier.

 

Apologies I used the incorrect terminology. Our fork is a Spear & Jackson and very similar to the Bulldog one. We also have the mattock tool which I had forgotten about as it is stashed away at the back of the garage so thanks for the reminder.

 

Surfer. I totally sympathise.
When I lived in Australia, bought a property on an ancient flood plain. (I didn't know that at the time)
The front 'garden' was just dehydrated grass and a couple of shrubs in very poor condition.
My first job was to prepare a bed for an Hibiscus hedge. So armed with my trusty spade and fork I set to work, and immediately came to a halt, when all the fork or spade did was to bounce off the surface, with barely a mark left on it.
A heavy duty mattock was then purchased and work recommenced, but not for too long, as the blade of the mattock broke. As I said, the soil, or should I say "concrete masquerading as soil", was stupidly hard. A replacement mattock got the job done, and that was the last time I attempted to "dig" in the garden.
From then on, every time I extended or opened a new bed, I soaked the area enough to excavate a trench a few inches deep to delineate the edge, then trailer loads of compost from the local recycling centre were just spread over the ground about 12" deep and planted. The roots and the worms slowly broke up the interface and the plants totally thrived. I never, over the years, ever bothered with fertilisers.
What I would do, if I had your exact issue, would be to use sleepers to give me the depth and backfill with a good quality compost. I currently use Melcourt Soil Improver for all my raised beds, in the garden I now have.

 

Another thought, what you are doing when digging out a hole for a plant is basically creating a plant pot. The roots of the plant are not going to go out of the decent stuff with which you fill the hole so the hole needs to be big enough (width and depth) to accommodate the potential root ball size of the plant. Thus the bigger the plant is going to grow to, the bigger the 'pot' it is going to need.
If your clay is like mine then the one thing you won't find is worms to break up and incorporate anything put on the top surface. The mulch I spread here is still on the surface now after 4 years.

 

We are from South Africa and thought in the UK with all the rain the soil would be quite easy to work with and till. We have a small vegetable patch which has been built up over the years with decent soil and we have had good results with it.

However we have not seriously got into the actual garden for planting flowers, shrubs etc.until about 2 days ago when we discovered our issue with the ground 6" down. Probably explains why we had difficulty growing flowers etc. in those areas. In our front garden which is mainly lawn we have roses growing and they are doing well especially the one of the Austin variety.

As you gather we are very amateur gardeners although our lawn is first class as we use Greenthumb. What got us back into serious gardening was every second year our village as an open day and people open up their gardens for people to view. Maybe in two years time we can also open our garden.

Maybe my idea regarding the boards and backfilling would be better, but I still need to loosen up the soil as much as possible? It is a long border garden along a fence and is less than a metre wide. The fence rests on concrete stays so we need to keep the soil away from the wooden fence. We can get the bundle of 2.4m boards(5) from our local Wickes although they do look a bit plain.

 

I would be tempted to possibly use boards, at the back, spaced just off the fence, and out of sight.
I wouldn't use boards along the front as they have a nasty habit of warping and need to be securely staked, and to me are only a "short term" solution.
I bought a batch of sleepers from Garden Sleepers | Buy Railway Sleepers For Gardens Online. and used steel fish-plates to join them all together.
200mm high and the height can easily be increased by stacking. Not the cheapest option, short term, but solid, long lasting and no unsightly stakes to hold in place.
As for the soil, the most I would do, would be to just break up the surface of the clay a bit and then fill the bed with good quality compost.
Don't worry about worms, they will very soon move in and start mixing the clay, soil and compost, as is their purpose in life.

 

That depends totally on what the mulch material is and its depth. Organics will disappear fairly quickly, but wood chips or barks can last for ages.