Hi, and welcome to NGA!
I agree with freezengirl - for in-ground soil, like raised beds, add
all the compost you can scrounge and make. Collect
dead leaves, coffee grounds, yard waste, paper, sawdust, manure, or almost anything organic that has no herbicides and few weed seeds.
My best find was the dumpster at a fruit stand. Starbucks and 7-11s and mini-marts will give away coffee grounds if you make it easy for them. Some people have been told to come by EARLY (like 7AM) with clean, empty 5 gallon buckets to fill with coffee grounds. Delis, fast-food paces, bakeries, and supermarket deli and bakery sections may give away 5 gallon buckets.
I think that raised beds are an excellent compromise between rows-in-the-ground and pots or buckets.
Say,
@Newyorkrita is THE master of growing vegetables in buckets. Any suggestions for the cheapest possible potting mix, Rita?
If you grow in containers, even 5-gallon buckets, AVOID ADDING SOIL to the buckets. Especially since you have clay soil, any soil in a container will pack down too tightly for roots to breath. You really need a soil-less mix for growing in buckets, so it continues to drain and "breath" for a season.
The way to make that cheaper is to make your potting mix mainly from ground, screened bark.
http://garden.org/ideas/view/R...
Look for dry, clean evergreen bark mulch. You should be able to get that around $3.50 per 2 cubic feet. Where I live, HD sells really junky, wet, fermenting logyard trash as bark mulch. Lowe's sells several bark products that are clean and dry, almost like orchid bark, for around $4 per 2 cubic feet. You'll have to screen them with 1/4" hardware cloth, maybe even 1/8".
Coca coir is around as good as bark, but some batches used to have too much slat in them. It is more expensive (I think). Also, each batch or each coir product is a different size or coarseness, and you want it coarser than fine peat moss but "grit size, not chunk size".
Probably the cheap bags of "potting mix" from HD or Lowes will be almost as bad as soil from an average garden (*) ... and if they call it "potting
soil", don't buy it if you plan to grow in pots. They put too-fine, water-retaining junk in those bags because they are cheap and novices don't know better. First-timers will try out a cheap product if they don't realize it will kill plants in pots.
Probably some gardener somewhere does manage to work with soil soil in pots, but after a few months of watering soil soil in a pot, most of us could use that rock-hard, impervious soil as ammunition in a catapult.
Cheap "potting mix" may not be AS bad as CLAY soil, but bad enough to stunt your plants and make success more difficult or impossible. Even on a tight budget, it may be true that one bale (3.8 cubic feet) of GOOD potting mix (like Pro-Mix or Fafard or Black Kow or Sunshine) will cost $27-$35, but do more good for plants in pots than an equal price for three times as much BAD potting mix. Just dilute the expensive mix 3X to 5X with really cheap screened bark.
I would rather mix 20% GOOD potting mix with 80% bark than use 50% BAD potting soil with 50% bark.
If you screen your bark carefully to get enough water retention and enough aeration, you might try cutting back to 10% good mix to save money. I would screen the bark as a first step, and try to make my screened bark as close to good potting soil as I can. Then add a little "good stuff" to remedy the bark's lacks.
Look for cheap sources of bark that you can screen, chop up, and re-screen.
Look for cheap sources of grit, crushed stone, and very coarse sand. (Your truck and a rock quarry and some fast talking or bags of fresh tomatoes?)
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If you make raised beds to defeat your clay and save water, also look for raw materials to make compost from. For outdoor soil, "compost" (and drainage) is (are) king, just like Real Estate is all about "location, location, location".
Once you have the raw materials, don't worry about "how to make compost" or how big the pile "should be" or how often you "should turn it". The truth about compost is that "if you pile it, it will rot". All the fancy compost-science in the world will only make that go faster and hotter (and maybe kill more weed seeds, if you put weed seeds into your heap).
If you are really obsessive about only composting "the right way" I suggest deferring your official compost heap for a few years. Instead just collect the raw materials. (As you collect them, store them somewhere in a heap. Don't keep the heap dry. Forget about it!) When you have read dozens of Internet articles and serious university papers about "how to compost", over a year or two, go back to your heap. Then you can either re-engineer your heap according to all those rules and whims, or just shovel the finished compost out from under the bottom of your "storage heap". It works.
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Some people put finished compost into pots, other prefer "near-sterile" mostly-inorganic soil-less mix ingredients.
Some people even manage to use their garden soil in pots, AND keep some worms alive in those pots!
But the conventional wisdom is that only
outdoor SOIL in the GROUND can sustain enough soil life to sustain real living SOIL.
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Compost, grit, sand and ground bark will lighten clay soil, and make it a little better-draining and a little better-aerated.
But you do need to add a LOT of such "gritty" stuff or chunky stuff like VERY fine gravel,
grit, VERY coarse sand, and
medium-ground pine bark or fir bark or balsam bark also lighten and aerate clay.
If your soil is pure clay, you might need to add up to 5 times as much grit as you have clay, to make "good soil" just with the grit, sand and clay. But adding a lot of compost at the same time seems to make the grit and sand "go farther". I try to start a new bed with almost 50% compost + bark fines, then 10-20% grit, and the rest native clay (broken up, screened and mixed with compost. Then aged and watered and screened again. Then turned with more compost each year for the first few years.
You'll also have to be very careful about tilling such clay soil. I think of it like "making an omelet" - I "whip the soil up" with fork and spade to add air and more compost to it. Then I firm it down a little to try to "set" it. Then, if I'm lucky and it has enough compost and grit and coarse sand, it won't just collapse back down into clay-grit soup.
The thread "A budget friendly veggie garden in Texas" in
Vegetables and Fruit forum
http://garden.org/thread/view_...
Hmm, I wonder what forum would be best for starting a thread like "Gardening on the CHEAP"?
(*)
Rita finds that almost any potting mix she buys is usable. Maybe I'm still over-watering or doing something else wrong. I have to add gritty stuff or even chunky stuff to "random bags of potting mix" to keep a deep container well-draining and well-aerated.
On the other hand, any 3.8 cubic foot "bale" of professional-style potting mix I saw was MUCH "loftier" and "open" than anything I've seen in a bag. The pro stuff is more expensive, hence I cut even that with bark because I'm cheap. (But I only buy a bale if it is "HP" (high porosity) or extra-fast-draining.)
