Garden Design Ideas For Clay Soil – What grows well in clay soil? Dense clay soil is common in yards across the country. It may seem challenging at first, but we’re here to help! With a few simple changes and the right plants, you can transform your garden with beautiful plants.
Knowing the type of soil you have in your garden is very helpful in determining what plants will thrive in it naturally or what amendments you may want to add. Soil consists of particles of clay, sand and silt. Most soils have a percentage of all three components, but the ratio of each is what determines the soil type. Clay is the smallest soil particle, while sand is the largest, while silt lies between the two.
Garden Design Ideas For Clay Soil
Although clay soil can sometimes be difficult to treat, it can provide the foundation for a nutrient-rich garden. Processing organic material helps to aerate the soil, and this is something you can continue with over time. Another recommendation is to avoid tilling clay soil when it is very wet, as it compacts very easily and destroys the soil structure. When you add plants that naturalize and spread, their root systems can also help improve soil structure
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Asters are easy-to-grow perennials that take care of themselves all summer. Their vigorous blooms appear later in the season, just as other flowers begin to fade. A surefire way to add stunning fall color for years to come, the lovely Aster flowers will remain true and strong until hard frosts arrive. This also makes them a popular and reliable food source for monarch butterflies, bees and other beneficial insects and pollinators. .
Astilbes are extremely easy to grow and reliable for your shade or partial shade garden. Their structural clouds come in a variety of colors, including pink, white, purple and red. ‘Deutschland’ produces striking white clouds to brighten up a shady area in mid-summer.
Available in almost any color imaginable, bearded irises are a garden favorite! They require very little attention and have no problems competing for their place in the garden. The rhizomes reproduce quite quickly, so it is useful to divide the plants every few years to avoid overcrowding and to spread the iris crop. Many bearded irises rebloom, so you can enjoy the color in both late spring and early to mid-autumn.
Your shade garden will explode with different textures and colors with these shade-loving perennials! When exploring perennials, use our helpful filters to find the right plants for your garden:
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To get a full season of color in your loam garden, plant flowers with a variety of bloom times!
Plants bloom in early spring, such as bearded iris, liverwort and creeping phlox. This early spring display will then be joined by the flowering of Indian pink, daylilies, butterfly bush, helenium and echinacea from late spring to early summer.
For your shade garden, Hostas and Astilbes will give you brilliant flowers in early summer. High summer would continue to add color with tall Panicle Plox, Black Eyed Susan, blue and red cardinal flower and bee balm. With the end of summer comes the colors of Sedum and Asters, bringing your garden into the autumn phase. Here will be your summer garden together with other bearded irises (if you have perennial varieties) and Liatris for your shade garden. Persistent Helenium and Echinacea blooms will last through the refreshing temperatures of late autumn.
A garden full of these clay-loving plants will give you a colorful cottage-like garden that fills up more and more each year! In early 2021, my wife and I bought our first (and hopefully only) home. It was a new construction on a private cul-de-sac with 7 other homes. New build homes, especially in the UK, have a reputation for poor quality gardens and our house was no exception. Rather than settle for less, and with both of us very dedicated to gardening, we challenged ourselves to transform this blank canvas of uneven, sloping clay soil into a very personally inspired landscape garden.
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I’ll cover the other parts of our garden eventually, but this Instructable is on our favorite part of the garden that has been transformed from a boring two story slope with a retaining wall and finished with lots of interesting plants!
Lots of tools are needed for this mammoth task, but we tried to do it on a budget, with Micro Digger only hired for 3 days, drop in for a week, borrowed tools and LOTS of manual labor, with help from friends too!
Fast forward to June 2022, we had an idea in our head of what we wanted to do to create the tiered section of our garden using the last third of our garden. Our eldest was also 7 months and we wanted the garden to be a good place when he left (turns out he was only 3 months later!). We hired a “Micro Digger” for 3 days (Friday morning delivery for Monday morning collection) costing around £350. a senior IT engineer by trade, but our friendly neighbor, Billy, recently did something similar in his garden, so he was willing to teach me Friday night and Saturday morning, as well as help me manage it, perhaps without him would take much longer to gain confidence! Watch the videos..
We also hired a ship for a week (Friday to Friday) which cost around £265. Funny that jumps cost the same for a month as they do for a day..! This was purely to get all the unwanted clay in, we literally maxed it out and it was so heavy the rubbish truck struggled to lift it!
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Before you even start digging, as exciting as the Micro Diggers are, make sure you have a plan and have marked where you want to dig with a spray marker. This doesn’t have to be exact, ours has changed a bit, but more or less so that the digger takes most of the dirt and not you with a spade/hoe. Making a dent by hand in clay soil is VERY hard work, as I discovered before I ordered the Micro Digger, it is heavy, dense and sticky.
The technique of what to dig first was more difficult than I first imagined, but basically required digging from the lowest point near the fence first, then working backwards towards the house so that the digger always had a platform to dig from.
Although the Micro Digger did 90% of the job, there were still parts that could only be done by hand, such as leveling the ground and straightening the edges of the wall, this was mainly done with the flat spade and hoe. This simply gave a better finish to the general appearance of the area before starting with the retaining wall.
Once again I asked for help building this retaining wall, my neighbor, Billy, pointed out to me before we even started that having right angles to make the wall U shaped would improve the strength drastically. This seemed logical to me, and then my dad helped me build the retaining wall with the following steps:
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1) Mark and dig holes for each fence post with a flat spade, leaving at least 5-10 cm space on each side of the post. This part was surprisingly easy, as one of the benefits of loam is that it holds its shape after digging. Make sure you have enough space behind the post holes/between the posts and the ground for your wood planks to fit later.
2) Probably the most important step, but remember this isn’t how the pros do it, but it worked well for us. Using the broken pieces of decking we had lying around, put a flat piece in the hole you just made and then place the fence post over it. Lightly tap the top of the fence post with a hammer. Check that the post is level at the top and sides with a spirit level, if not, remove the fence post and adjust the plate at the bottom of the hole correctly. This process takes time, but it is important. Once you are satisfied that it is as even as possible, fill the hole with more excess rubble/slabs to support the pre-post concrete post.
3) Once the fence post is in place in the hole, water the bottom with a watering can/hose with FRESH water (not rainwater). Now add enough post concrete (for us about half a 20kg bag) to fill the hole, then water thoroughly. The drying time is about 10 minutes, but we left them for at least 30 minutes before touching the rod. Again, this is best done on a warm day.
4) Repeat steps 2-3 for each post, 9 times in our case. Don’t worry about