You’re gonna need as much well rotted organic matter as you can get, I’d look into free municipal compost, aged manures if you can find some for free (old cow patties are just fine, or if you can clean out a stall that’s been empty for a while etc. You can gather leaf mold from the forest, you want deciduous leaves not conifer needles, your Piedmont soil is already acidic besides the heavy clay texture. Leaf mold is the nice wet brown stuff between the upper layer of fresh leaves and the actual dirt, it’s great and it’s free. Rabbit pellets are great to use right away if you have a source of those, no aging required. If there’s a brewery near you, call and ask if you can come get a tote or two of spent mash, there’s research showing that it’s great for soil regeneration:
If you know someone who mows their lawn or field and tosses in a pile orover a hillside, and doesn’t spray nasty chemicals, go dig out that pile and get the musty half decomposed stuff off the bottom, that’s excellent too. Anything to up the ratio of organic matter to non-organic matter that’s already well decomposing and loaded with microbial and fungal life is what you want, really.
You need to add liming in some form, could be actual lime (I like Espoma Lightning Lime, which is micronized then made into pellets, so it’s mostly dust free but breaks down and gets working in just a month or two. Gypsum is a good and dirt cheap option you might be able to get for free from someone’s garage or barn. Clam shells are great, so are bone meals, crab shells, fish bones, scales, guts, shrimp shells, anything like that. If you can get feathers or blood from a neighbor, farm, or slaughterhouse those are also great, and composted chicken manure or bedding is usually dirt cheap at a farm supply in big bags. Greensand is good too if you come across that, your soil probably needs potassium to balance the sodium content too. For aeration maybe you can find rice hulls somewhere? Or wheat chaff, stuff like that, also landscaping pumice is great stuff that sits around free sometimes.
A good start might be going to your local farmers market and talking to farmers and food producers about what sorts of wastes they have around, when I was a bread baker at one place we had a pig farmer who would come take the old hard bread and mix it with boiling water in a barrel for slop after running the loaves through a wood chipper. That wouldn’t be a bad thing to add into your soil, basically malted and digested grains just like the brewers mash. I’m here for you dude you can do this!
I think this thread is a good start to read:
https://permies.com/t/88823/Building-heavy-acidic-clay-soil
And this is a good one about making leaf mold:
https://permies.com/t/13602/Incredible-Amazing-Leaf-Mold
