First thing I would do is go to my local ag office they usually have soil maps for all the areas and will be able to tell you much about your soil. Next would be to get some litmus paper or a ph meter because it sounds like you have a salt of some sort leaching out.
Nick
Ps there are clays and then there are clays. Some have way more expansion when wet than others too much is not good.
From:
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 10:57 PM
To:
Subject: [papercreters] Bought a parcel of land
Hello papercreters, I have some happy news and not so happy news. First the happy news, I bought a parcel of land! It is 2.5 acres in the Central Californian outback. It is off the grid but if I want to pipe into electricity it is one lot away.
The not so happy news stems from my newfound apprehension about my first holes dug on the property.
I need to find someone who has some knowledge or experience on soil. Before I build I need to know what I'm up against on this property. There are patches of the soil which are thin of vegetation and has a white powder on the surface. So I dug some holes, the white part seemed to be kind of shallow and once I got down deeper than that it looked like very very nice clay-loam soil. Easily breaks up and all probably because it is all fluffed up from vegatation with a kazillion microscopic roots in just one shovel full. As I dug deeper though, the soil looked very nice. It has practically no sand, but it has a lot of loam. So I grabbed a handful to do a compression test on it. Squeezed and released and it stuck together real good and it got smaller too. So I kept squeezing to see how compact I could get it with just my hand and it had to have compressed at least 1/3 to 1/2. Suddenly I had visions of a cob house. This soil is really good for cob, I think. But maybe not.... A day later, I'm at work to pass the good news to my buddy about buying this land. So I found my clay ball, it had lots of white crystals forming on the surface! Now hours later, the area I swiped with my finger is regrowing little hairs little crystals forming on the surface. Now this soil came from deep in the hole I dug. It had nothing visible white about it at all. It was only moist. (we just had a spot of rain a couple of times in the past week at that location). Fast forward to another hole I dug, I dug about half a dozen holes in various places. This other hole I dug I got down to the clay where it is noticeably clay and hard to dig and I got a half a shovel full of it and noticed white specks in the clay. More than specks actually. About 1/4 inch in size they were everywhere equally. Not so the clay looked white, but more like how much chocolate is in chocolate chip ice cream on one of the cheap brands. Back to the clay ball forming white powder on surface, I had had visions of perimeter fruit trees, some row crops (its 2.5 acres) and an off the grid cob house which is dirt cheap (haha) but now I'm wondering about soil quality not just for the fruit trees in my mind but also for anything that would use the soil. In other words I'm wondering if I would be able to use this soil in papercrete as an additive, or rammed earth, or cob or adobe or whatever uses there are for soil for that matter.
Back to finding someone with knowledge or experience on soil, if anyone has someone they could direct me to, I'd appreciate it a lot!
Perry
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