Determining your clay content is fairly simple, all you need is a pickle jar or similar, some clay and some water!
Make sure you agitate well until all the clay has dissolved. The sand will settle immediately. It’s best to make a mark so you can see exactly where the line is for later when you’re working out the ratios.
As you can see, we have a lot of clay in our soil. It’s almost 1:5. This means for each bucket of clay, I’ll need about 2 buckets of sand.
I'm Tim, a 31yr old ex-Allotmenteer. My wife and I used to have a small 5 rod plot in South Essex where we grew all manner of veg. I'm also involved in brewing the odd keg of beer.
When getting down the allotment got too hard and our circumstances changed we bought a house with a 65ftx30ft garden, which we're converting into a mini orchard and veg beds.
We get up to some weird and wonderful projects - we've built a small boat, a pig roaster (powered by a windscreen wiper), a chicken run, raised beds and try our hands at all sorts of stuff getting us closer to being 'self sufficientish'.
The hope is to introduce chickens soon and hopefully let them free range during the day.
If you want to contact me, you can do so here
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