Hey again
It's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm today I wanted to talk to you about whether it's the right thing to use
Sand to improve your heavy or clay soils now if you'll recall I made a video about a year ago on how to improve heavy
And clay soils and if I mentioned sand at all
Maybe I even didn't it really was a video focused on adding organic amendments and green mulches to the top of your soil
things like
woodchips compost manure leaf mold or
again, green mulches like comfrey or alfalfa or cover crops and
So I didn't talk about sand in that video
Particularly, but it came off in the comment section
a lot of people came out and said well isn't sand the best way to improve the texture of your soil and
we had a good vigorous debate on that and I like that I like that we can try to sort this stuff out together
so I wanted to go today and talk about the difference between
Texture soil texture and soil structure
The difference between soil texture and soil structure is so important so fundamental to soil science
It was literally the first thing I learned in my soil science class in university perhaps even on the first day
So soil texture is what you classically hear about when you talk about soil types
It's the sand the silt and the clay soil structure is an entirely a different thing, which I'll explain in a minute
But let's go over texture first. If you will you will call those the
Ingredients of your soil. They're not the cake itself. They're just like the flour the sugar of the eggs
Okay, they determine what went into the soil, but not how it was baked
So that's the analogy I'll bring forward here. So of course sand sandier soils are looser
They have a lot more pore spaces. They're gonna let the soil run
They're gonna let the water run through a lot quicker. They'll have lots of air spaces in them, you know silty and
Particularly clay soils are much much heavier, and they retain nutrients a lot more
They retain moisture a lot more and they're just heavier and stickier as soils
so when we're talking about sand silt and clay we really are just talking about the ingredients and
soil scientists put gather
soil
texture
triangle to show you how that's going to work
I'm gonna put up a copy of that on the screen here and
maybe highlight a section here to show that at the very bottom end of this that's going to include your
Sandiest and siltiest soils, but at the top portion of the pyramid here
It's talking about your clay soils and you'll see how far the line goes down. In fact anything down to about 20 percent clay
Components in your soil has heavy or sticky characteristics of clay and by the time you get to 30 or 40 percent
It's completely dominated by clay characteristic
Now if that told the whole story that was all you had to worry about was just what ingredients are in your soil
This would be a much easier video
I would be much more ready to just say okay tear up the whole lot put down a whole bunch more sand
Grind it in with your rototiller. You're golden
the part that is not
So clear-cut from that approach is that soil structure is something entirely different?
That is how the cake is baked
With all the air holes and all the the structure of that of that of that profile
so if I dig out a section of soil
Which I'll do here you'll see that at the top end of the soil. It has a lot more organic matters a lot looser
it's a it's the part where the worms and the soil life are interacting with the organic matter and
digging that into the top end of the soil and then as you move down through the soil profile the
characteristics change it moves from being rather organic and it has lots of spaces and lots of soil life to an area that is
Less so and then towards the bottom of your soil and even getting down deeper into the subsoil almost completely
Lacking of those of those components, so it's not homogeneous from top to bottom and those air spaces and the water
Movement through that as well as the soil life and the organic matter
Makes up a really really important component of what your soil performance is
And in fact the way that it has settled like that the way that it's been in there with the fungus and and everything
Working in that soil. It's like it's a living
profile all to its own
and
Once you go in there and you grind it up and you add a new component
you and you make this homogeneous layer of like say 18 inches if you were going to of
a new mixture of sand silt and clay
Primarily you've completely disrupted what was existing and what was working and existing in your soil previously
so to say that yes, you've changed if you if you increased sand and you're in your soil that
Changing that ingredient would change the characteristics. Absolutely
But there's a cost to doing that not only the cost and labor not only the cost in bringing in sand but the cost
Immediately to the condition of your soil. So going back to that baking analogy. I made the
Ingredients the sand the silt in the clay
If you adjust that and you do that by grinding it up and putting in a bunch of new ingredients
It's a bit like and I'm gonna call this the pastry dough analogy
So a pastry dough is a specially prepared dough that has all sorts of different layers in it
and so when you put it in the oven and you bake it those layers that structure is
is is baked in and so when I take a cut of profile of this what you'll see is a very thick of
airy
pastry dough
whereas if I take the same dough
Same ingredients stick them in the in the blender or the food
Processor in advance and just mash it up and roll it out and put it into the oven
I'm not going to get the same results what I'm gonna end up getting is something that's much much thinner and lacking all of those
air spaces so the cost of putting in those new
ingredients into your soil is a is much the same that you've you've basically completely interrupted the
Existing structure of the soil in favor of trying to adjust those ingredients
so the most contentious thing I may have to deal with in this video here is
the allegation that you'll have to add a lot of sand to your clay soil to make it better and
Some of that comes from internet sources in one particular one. I will link below
She's a credible source. I've liked her stuff before Linda Chalker Scott
PhD from Washington State actually
who explains that because the
clay will have to will fill in the pores between the sand you have to add an awful lot of sand to make the
Improvement. I did a calculation myself. It didn't seem catastrophic if I if I looked at a twenty by twenty plot of land
so you're doing a veggie garden say twenty by twenty and
You wanted to amend it to about two feet and you're trying to move the clay content from from forty percent
Down to thirty percent so that you can get into the loam territory. I
calculated that
Depending on how you did it whether you removed material
and then added some or whether you just heaped on a bunch and then till then you might have to add between 60 and
260 cubic feet of sand which yeah sounds like a lot of work
It sounds like a lot of material but it's not catastrophic by any means and if that gets you the results that you need
Hey good on you
My only focus of this video is to make you understand that that doesn't happen without a cost and once again
I'm not talking about the physical cost of sand. I'm not talking about the labor cost of putting in the sand
I'm talking about every time that you dig your soil and you till your soil you
sacrifice those fungal structures the life the the air holes and everything else you make this homogeneous layer of
the
Ingredients but it basically has to start all over again to get the the structure back that it needs to to
to make great plant root systems
So before you go ahead and try to add sand as an amendment dig in a big volume of sand into your garden
I'd like you to consider
some of the alternatives and
I'll point towards another youtube channel
I think his name is Charles Dowding who doesa No-Dig Channel and I kind of like what he does there
It's a basically a sheet mulch that he uses with
mounds of organic matter that he's using on top of the native soil
So it's a is basically like a raised bed
but without all those pesky wooden borders that eventually rot out on you and
I can see the advantage of this because from that layer of organic matter
He's got on the top that layer of manure or compost
that he has on the top the plants can establish good roots and will probably even
Dig below that and get into the native soil
Which is fantastic over time that addition of organic matter is going to improve his soil from top down and I think that's a fantastic
Approach. All right. Those are my two cents on
Using sand to improve your clay or heavy soil
I hope you found this useful if you have any questions or comments or debates or or rude remarks leave those below the video and
I'll be happy to answer those as well. Thank you so much