heating the ground during winter in Michigan?

[ladyinfidel]

I have a new garden that I dug up last year. The ground was alley so it's grey wet clay. Last year, I mixed in some compost/dirt and tried to plant a garden, which went surprisingly well but now, I have leaves ontop of the dirt/clay now (and it's frozen, here in Michigan). I have oodles of compost in various stages of decomp, that I could put on

Comments

[sammason]

If you have any old windows or clear plastic sheets you could spread them over the ground to help it warm up, making a kind of greenhouse effect. I suppose black plastic might work too.

I'm all in favour of top-dressing (spreading compost or muck on top of your soil) and letting the worms and other soil invertebrates do a lot of the work for you, so long as what's underneath is not compacted. If it's compacted you'll need to aerate it by cultivation but if not, I don't think you need to wait until the soil thaws. If you top-dress now you won't have to spend time on it once your planting season starts.

Raising the pH of clay soil, by adding lime, can lighten it a lot. But it's not such a good idea to do this at the same time you feed the soil with something rich like compost, because a chemical reaction would happen, in which a lot of the nitrogen in your lovely rich compost would gas off as stinky ammonia instead of going to your plants' roots. So I use lime and compost separately, at different stages of my crop rotation.

[ladyinfidel]

how long in btn applying the lime can I do the compost? can I do the lime in the winter? and thanks!

[sammason]

I'm glad you asked because this thing about not mixing lime with compost/muck is one of those 'things I've known for ages' but I'd never been sure how long apart the 2 could be applied to soil. A spot of Googling has just found me this which says 'a couple of months' is a long enough time gap. I suppose it partly depends on the weather. Rain will wash lime into the soil. Warm temperatures will encourage the compost to be incorporated into the soil's humus.

[sammason]

Oops I forgot to respond to your question about liming in winter. Yes you can go ahead. I generally lime in autumn and let the winter rain or snow wash it in.

[oxymoron02]

To get your compost ready sooner, it needs to be thermophilic. It can be hard to get thermophilic compost without a lot of foresight, especially where it's cold.

Journey to Forever has a lovely site on making compost. You might check them out. Household compost activator makes me giggle, but I'm still going to use it. :)