Middle Buster and Compacted Clay

[LukeDuke30]

While I had the middle buster attached for some light gutter trenching, I decided to make a pass over a heavily compacted area of our land. This was a long-time hay pasture. We had a few hundred tons of fill dirt sitting here for about 18 months. We are in the process of building a house. Once the dozer moved the dirt over to our house, they graded it down. However, it was like concrete. I made a quick pass through it, and it seemed to break it up well. I ended up doing the whole area (just under and acre). I will end up discing it, then roto tilling. Of course, I had my big helper with me or else it wouldn't have been so easy!

 

[jeff9366]

How moist was the soil?

In north Florida clumps that large indicate dry soil. May not be the same in Indiana.

 

[leonz]

You need to spread mined gypsum to dissolve that clay and lime to bring up the PH
so you can seed it before the winter comes.
We did that with four acres of so so grass and it choked out the weeds as well.

 

[LukeDuke30]

How moist was the soil?

In north Florida clumps that large indicate dry soil. May not be the same in Indiana.

Because the top 2-3 inches was so hard, it was almost trapping some moisture below. When the fill dirt was dumped, it was fairly wet. After they moved the dirt, I let it sit a few months to help dry out. Yesterday was the first time it was dry enough below to attempt it. If you look close, some of the clay clumps are still wet, while others are bone dry.

 

[Texasmark]

Am I missing something? I have Houston Black Clay, slightly Alkaline. Lime is alkaline and used on Acidic soils like sandy loams?????? Have heard of the Gypsum treatment to improve the texture of clay but never saw/heard/researched the subject.

 

[leonz]

Hello TexasMark,

Gypsum works well and it needs to be mixed into the soil either tilled in with a rototiller or disced in.

If deep mined or chemically rendered gypsum is spread over un-tilled sod it will dissolve the clay and the lime will
bring the PH up to near neutral( my dad needed 12 tons per acre to cure his lawn ills but he only wanted to buy a 1/2 of lime pellet and bagged deep mined gypsum).

We did this to 4 acres of good grass sod that went bad over time and it made the turf much stronger. I need to do it to my place as well to choke out the weeds by using the pelleted limestone to bring the PH up.
We use a lot of hydrated and milled lime dust and hammer milled lime stone to aid the soil PH up here and it works.

Excess lime will also affect crop yields and reduce them as well. This was well documented by the sugar beet farmers in the Idaho cooperatives.

The limestone dust is to create Carbon Dioxide in the limestone kiln sugar extraction towers to strip the raw brown sugar syrup from both sugar beets in the northern cooperatives in Michigan, Minnesota Idaho and California and chopped and crushed sugar cane in the south.

The sugar grower scooperatives simply stored the limestone sludge on the factory properties for years as it was too expensive to land fill it. several the local cooperatives members needed lime for their farm land and took several tons of the limestone sludge, spread it and then planted row crops and another beet crop on rotated acreage and the yield increase were dramatic.

They also found that increasing the time from 4 years to 5 years rotation for sugar beets also increased the tonnage of beets per acre and the sugar per acre in the process of the experimenting which was well documented in the magazine "SugarBeet" and by the Michigan Sugarbeet Growers Cooperative.


A soil test will tell you how much gypsum and lime you will need.

Sod ash will also dissolve clay as well.