some drywalls contain additives to make them more fire resistant or insulating, might be harmful, especially if theyre old and contain asbestos and such. if youre lucky you find an intact serial or make number or somin that allows you to identify it.
depending on the size of your planned growth and your physicial abilities you can probably dig it up and improve the soil manually. weed doesnt really need super deep soil, 3ft/1m or so would probably be enough. Mind you i only ever dug up semi clayish like soil so dunno how crazy hard it is to break the soil at Your spot. might be asshard or goey, or both and i wouldnt necessarily wanna volunteer lol.
Sand has minerals that might be usable by certain microbial life (calclium for example, says so on the bird sand! :D), im not sure if it becomes usable for your plants in a timely manner thou, but id simply use it as a loosening agent at least, and then add organics like compost or even just weeds and whatever is around. The problem with clay soil in that case would be more about moisture dispersion or absorbtion and the possibility of standing water, especially after heavy rainfalls that might create long standing puddles One could observe the landscape to find suitable areas that drain well.
If its a hillside, or anything with a gentle slope, you could add a bottomlayer of rocks and pebbles as a drainage, but gotta be careful not to create a mudslide of sorts, maybe by breaking up the field from time to time, pref with plants that pierce the clay and establish reinforcing roots that hold your soil in place, yet wont overshadow the grow.
I watched some friends turn a series of bare sandy run down paddocks into lush pasture using only peanuts, daikon radish and Berkshire grazing pigs. They would plant out the ground with peanuts because they can fix their own nitrogen, and also daikon radish because they grow a giant 2 foot tap root, and then they would let the pigs in to turn everything over to get the peanuts and radishes and crap everywhere in the process, and then when they had eaten as much as they could dig up they would move them to the next paddock and start again. After a few years of cycling through this the difference was unbelievable, all while not using any machines, pesticides or herbicides.
And Berkshire pigs need only basic electric fencing to be kept in. They are not fence jumpers or crazy escape artists.
They also used the pigs when making dams in sandy ground, they would put a few loads of mud and clay in the bottom of a new sandy dam, and then let pigs in to wallow, and they would spread the mud around and their hooves compact it into the sand so that it seals it. Then they let the water fill up and clear for a while and away you go. Blew me away how resourceful some people can be.
@sfzombie13 if you aren’t trolling ;
the drywall thing it would be really neat to see pan out;
Obviously remove the non-composting materials and kick down n let nature do the rest.
.
I do have more advanced questions in regards to adding either clay or gypsum to make viable soil…
.
Would it be smart to spend at least a season acclimating and stabilizing nute-density in soil?
.
Also; Would a mychorizae-blend
or other mycelium
maybe help speed up
And maybe help with the nutrient stability within a “newly-viable” soil?
….
Add…
Thoughts on Activated Charcoal (biochar) applications??
…
Basically wondering
What would be necessary
and what would be unnecessary
in an advanced homemade recipe?
not trolling at all. the church bought two houses across from the school and are using one as an office and the other will be torn down for a parking lot. i was amazed that nobody offered to give it to the family renting it, so i had them do that and found out how to get it moved down the block to an empty lot. it would’ve cost $60k so they decided to move instead, so they gave it to me. i am trying to get it all down to reuse most of it before they make the parking lot. i have about three weeks left and the floor is almost halfway up now. drywall comes down after the shingles.
just found out yesterday most of the drywall isn’t gypsum at all but some brown furry type of board. pretty sure it isn’t asbestos but i did run into some on the floor in one spot but it’s encapsulated linoleum. so i won’t be able to test the clay amendment theory. i was gonna put in terraces but that’s a lot of work when i don’t even know if i need them. we had three acres total in two properties and were using two one acre fields as pastures and rotating them.
about three years ago, i got the one pasture in great shape and spent $75 on seed, right before my son gave it to his sister and got rid of the horse and donkey. i think i’ll be ok on drainage but sure would have liked to get some seeds to try a small plot this year. oh well, not like i’ve never wasted $110 before…i still have time to make seeds if i can get some by next week.
That’s a lil trickier.
The answer is still gypsum, then clay and compost. But a soil test would determine how much gypsum based on calcium levels.
But, even if your calcium levels are pegged to the max, you can achieve cation balance by upping the other cations until correct ratios are achieve. Basically 70% Ca, 8-15% Mg, 5% K, etc.
Remember, ratios of cations are more important than pounds-per-acre levels.
Mycorrhizae only works with roots in the soil. So, like a cover crop. My favorites are clover, vetch, and wheat or barely grasses. Oh, mustards also are amazing.
I’ve seen pigs do amazing things with dead soil.
But, you’re gonna wanna cover the field with EM-1 to remediate the pathogens from the pig shit. Plus, you’re likely gonna get swine flu (no big deal, you get it once and it’s all good).
Even gypsum drywall has lots of additives and bad aluminum levels.
Soil and azomite have high aluminum levels, but it’s safely tied up as aluminum silicate and hard to make into free aluminum. Not the case for drywall.
So, if soil structure is your main goal - yes you could use drywall, but you’d want to do a season or three of a trash crop that gets discarded away from consumable crops to sequester any free aluminum and other heavy metals in the drywall. Fungi also works well for this.
Grow out vetch / fungi, then harvest and dump em somewhere in nature. Then start growing you consumable crops or start growing your composting crops to make into either chop-n-drop or a compost pile
you don’t really have to though. hemp puts the heavy metals (~80% of them) into the roots to store them there. given the dispersion of the rest of it into the remaining plant material would likely reduce the al to harmless levels inside the bud. and that is for hemp to smoke while i am making paper out of mine. no way to poison yourself with al when you’re trying to smoke hemp paper. i would say you would give up long before poisoning yourself unless you really like smoking paper.
In my experience in the red clay soil of South Carolina, adding sand to clay basically makes cement! I currently grow most stuff out of 5 gallon buckets due to this. I have been able to slightly improve it over a couple of years time by adding leaves in the fall, compost, wood chips and purchased top soil.
I made a 15’ x 20’ area for a garden that was improved but still not great. This year I did not put a garden in and let grass grow up, I will probably till it up in the fall and throw more leaves in it and cover it up for next year.
much appreciated dude 