Soil holding too much water

[veggiechicken]

My garden's waterlogged too - I doubt there are many gardens that aren't at the moment.
I don't do anything to the soil when its wet - its too heavy. My couch grass, bindweed etc will stay where it is until the ground dries up. Even then, it will stay where it is unless I really need that area for something else.

[Logunner]

If you have marestail, learn to live with it. IMO all you can do is keep digging

But you don�t have to live with it.


For the OP. No point trying to dig saturated soil. Why risk losing the trees due to such poor conditions?

[greenishfing]

My allotment is also a bog at the moment. I don't intend doing anything to it for weeks until it dries out. I have to get in quickly then before it turns to concrete with big cracks. Oh the joy of clay soil!! But it does hold nutrients.
The worst thing you can do ( my husband did it in the early days of having the allotment) is dig it over into large lumps and then let it dry out. It is then useless for months!!!!! Like a pile of bricks!

[ameno]

I suspect your basic problem is that Somerset is full of water. Even if you make the soil more amenable to drainage, it'll just have nowhere to go.

My plot is on a hill (as too is my house), so there are plenty of places for the water to go. It's not high water table which is the issue (if anything, the deeper I dig, the drier it gets), it's just the soil itself has sponge-like absorbancy (and it rains a lot).

[Greenleaves]

But you don’t have to live with it.


For the OP. No point trying to dig saturated soil. Why risk losing the trees due to such poor conditions?

Enlighten us logunner how do you beat marestail?

[MyWifesBrassicas]

I live with marestails and loads of them.
I have moments when I have a bit of a blitz pulling them up when they're in full growth and turn them into fertiliser, this doesn't dent them in the slightest though.
I think their roots are that deep, they don't really interfere with anything I'm growing, I just accept them

[ameno]

Right, I've finished dressing the tree patches with sharp sand and spent hops, and now I've covered them with a layer of cardboard and then a layer of plastic. This should keep most of the rain off, and hopefully by sometime in the new year they should be dry enough to plant.
Covering the soil does seem pretty effective. I covered one patch with only cardboard (so it's not exactly waterproof), and half of the cardboard blew away in the wind, but even so when I uncovered it today the soil under the remaining cardboard was much less sticky and more easily workable than the exposed areas.

[Logunner]

Enlighten us logunner how do you beat marestail?

Got to battle it with ammonium sulphamate, patience, digging and ground cover.

[ameno]

Got to battle it with ammonium sulphamate, patience, digging and ground cover.

I don't think it's worth the effort.
Although it spreads a lot and is very hard to eradicate, it's not exactly dense or vigorous (as long as you at least keep on top of it, rather than letting it just take over). I can't imagine it competes all that much with other plants.
Same goes for hedge bindweed, to be honest. With both, if you just remove what you can once a year when you dig the veg patch, then hoe off any that appears in between, you can easily keep it to an acceptable level, even if you won't ever eradicate it completely.
When I first took on my plot, I saw the horsetail and I dreaded it. Having worked on it for eight months now, I've learnt that horsetail really isn't that bad and is quite easy to keep on top of (just like hedge bindweed, which I also have at home). The real menace is couch grass. That stuff is a nightmare. And even field bindweed is worse than horsetail or hedge bindweed.

Complete eradication would be a pipe dream on my plot, anyway, as all the paths and neighbouring plots are full of it, too, so it'll just move back in.

[veggiechicken]

Got to battle it with ammonium sulphamate, patience, digging and ground cover.

You shouldn't be recommending the use of a chemical which is not approved as a herbicide in the UK.

[Mark_Riga]

My couch grass, bindweed etc will stay where it is until the ground dries up. Even then, it will stay where it is unless I really need that area for something else.

You must have really well behaved weeds in South Wales VC. I wish my couch grass would just stay put.

[veggiechicken]

Instead of weeding, I move the beds to get away from it Its heading southwards and there's not much more room to move them now.

However, I actually enjoy pulling up couch roots, when the soil is right, not too wet and sticky or too dry when the roots snap. Its so satisfying when you can track a long length of root and remove it intact. Its the little things that make gardening so enjoyable.

[rary]

An old way of treating clay soil was to add lime to the ground, so you could try adding some lime to a small area to see if it works, though it might take a bit of time to make a difference

[ameno]

An old way of treating clay soil was to add lime to the ground, so you could try adding some lime to a small area to see if it works, though it might take a bit of time to make a difference

It's the calcium in the lime which helps break clay.
I'm using crushed up plasterboard (which is gypsum, calcium sulphate) instead, partly because I already had a load of plasterboard offcuts lying about, so it was free, and partly because calcium sulphate doesn't affect soil pH, unlike lime (calcium carbonate).

[AntC]

You shouldn't be recommending the use of a chemical which is not approved as a herbicide in the UK.

Good point VC, but I'm not sure that it's been banned in the UK specifically but in the EU in general because the suppliers refused to test the product on dogs which, seems to me to be entirely sensible. It is able to be used as a compost accelerator and, as I understand it, is broken down to totally non toxic residues. IMHO it's probably safer than Glyphosate and I guess that from February 1 we will be able to use it as a herbicide.