>> I've eliminated the 'pile' step from composting, and do all sheet composting now, in place, on beds.
I think you're smart, and get the maximum "milage" out of the raw materials that way. I'm not sure whether I resist sheet composting mainly becuase it looks untidy, or simply and emabarassingly that I resist changing my methods becuase I'm stuck in my ways.
I bet it looks better when you add some materials on top of a 3" layer of similar stuff, than it looks when I drop weeds or clippings on top of bare soil or a thin layer of mulch.
I think that if I had access to 10 times as much compost as I do, my methods would be very similar to your methods (assuming it kept the deeper layers from reverting to pure clay.
>> Not sure right now if I actually ever need to till again, but I do think it's necessary in the earlier years of improving your soil. Just my opinion...
That is my exact practice, and it would be my firm opinion except that I've read about so many "lasagna gardeners" that I have to acknowledge that their way must work, too.
I think that partly, "everybody is like Frank Sinatra: I did it MY way". Partly, everyone's soil, climate, situation, goals and abilitiies are different and they find methods that work for them in their back yard.
I know the temptation to proselytize the theory that "MY WAY" is "THE ONLY WAY", but I also know that that theory is worng, worng, wrong.
>> Adding something like sand or grit sounds like much too much effort to me if it has to be incorporated below the surface.
I enjoy the turning and mixing, I really feel like I am CREATING the mechanical soil structure, which seems to me the very first requriement for fertility. Fropm the amount of trenching and digging I did in my first few years in this yard, I MUST have some mole DNA in my ancestry. Deep digging IS fairly intense work, but it doesn;t strain my legs as much as weeding or sowing or transplanting.
And, maybe it's a factor, when I was a kid the only garden task I was allowed to do was the twice-annual turning of the soil to break up clods and incorporate leaves and compost. Since that was my only connection to the garden, I formed, I guess, a soil-digging fetish.
And for sure, two years of double-digging and turning compost under changed that from "nasty dirt" to "fertile soil". I didn't know, then, that simply piling 3-5 times as much OM on top of the soil would have a similar effect in a similar number of years. (That soil started out MUCH better than my current clay. I'd guess it was clay loam with 30-35% clay. part of its problem was simply that it was totally compacted, so the first few years of tilling and adding OM accomplished turning solid blocks into fine crumb structure and "adding lots of air".
I find the hardest part about adding sand and grit is the cost and difficulty of hauling, even if only by wheelbarrow from the driveway to the farther beds. HEAVY!! And making a big difference takes a lot of sand. But making a small improvement during the first few years is enough to get my beds jump-started.
I'm really glad that a few people have said they also found sand helpful in clay soil that started out "too clayey". It seems to be a majority opinion overall that "clay + sand = concrete", as if the fault came from adding sand, not from withholding organic matter.
Nothing can be real soil without organic matter. Pure clay needs OM even more than most soils.
But my theory is that if your "dirt" started out near the very tip-top of the soil triangle (more than 60% clay, less than 40% sand or silt), it will probably help if you can add enough sand or silty to bring it into the middle regions, even if it would still be called "clay" and not "clay loam" by a pedant.
From what you've been saying, it sounds as if very frequent and plentiful additions of lots of OM can reduce the need for that "non-clay mineral fraction".
All I had before this discussion was that, when I was trying to make as many new beds as possible with a very limited compost budget, and starting with rock-hard relatively pure clay, it seemed that a little sand and grit and insoluble fibers went a long way towards making the improvement from my small amount of compost "last longer".
Now that I think about it, that supports one of my other theories, which is that soil is better when it has "enough of everything". If anything is TOO low a % of the soil, it gets much worse. Picture soil trying to be fertile if it had almost NONE of any one of these:
air
water
organic matter
soil life
clay
sand
silt
Maybe when two or three ingredients are all too low, increasing one of them can sometimes make up for other lacks.
If it doesn't have "enough" sand or silt, it needs a lot of OM to make up for the lack.
If it doesn't have enough OM OR sand OR silt OR grit, adding even a little more sand multiplies the benefit of little more OM.
Plus, sand and silt last forever. When "not enough OM" decomposes and turns into "WAY not enough OM", at least having a little sand and grit help keep it aerobic until I DO buy more compost.
