My soil is full of clumps of clay and I’m wondering if this is the answer. Any issues with using it?
I just planted a bunch of driller Diakon Radishes in my front yard to do some biological tillage on all of my clay soil.
Lots of info on YouTube about doing this.
I plan to leave most of them in the ground to compost, but I plan to pull some for eating.
The cool thing about them is that pull needed nutrients from deep underground.
This is what I bought: https://meritseed.com/driller-daikon-radish-annual/
Just thinking of the shape of Daikon radishes, this might work even better than the potato version, which is pretty great.
That sounds very promising, thanks for the info!
It’s late (early?) here, so I read “my oil is full of lumps of clay…” I imagined you topping off your car’s oil tank with this, and was thinking “holy shit DO NOT do this!!!”
Never mind. Time for bed.
I’m unfamiliar with the product but a quick read through polylignosulfanates and their industrial uses caught my eye when it mentioned deflocculation - my understanding is that materials like gypsum increase flocculation of clay particles, causing them to have additional pore space. That process allows better penetration of water and humic substances in addition to plant roots. Maybe @Track_Shovel has some input; he’s a better dirtnerd than I.
I need to do some googling to understand exactly what that means, thank you for the info. That garden bed is just so bloody dense, with random lumps of clay and constantly damp.
I’d use gypsum.
Would that be from a nursery or somewhere like a farm supply store? I don’t have a car, so it needs to somewhat portable.
In Australia it would be from a nursery or hardware dept store. Not sure about your location.
Check the ingredients, a lot of times it’s just soap / detergent. It does work. Some guy on YouTube experimented with it. Sorry, I forget the channel name.
It’s on the bottle: polylignosulfonates
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169131717305355
The lignosulfonate is the by-product of wood and paper processing industry, categorized under lignin based organic polymers, and normally considered a waste. It was found that, with increasing lignosulfonate content, the critical hydraulic shear stress of the treated dispersive soil samples increased, and the coefficient of soil erosion decreased
