Heavy clay soil

I've been experiencing what is definitely heavy clay subsoil/building fill in the mountains.

Digging below the top layer of composted leaves and mulch, I hit almost solid clay, either red, or gray, or in between. It's not like the rocky clay subsoil of our garden in the Piedmont, which crumbles easily, making it simple to incorporate soil amendments like compost, ground pine soil conditioner, and leaves.

This stuff is ready for pot-making--slick, tough, and hard to break up. The best I can do in the new trellis beds (and elsewhere) is to liberally dig up the clods with soil conditioner and bagged organic 'garden soil' -- a mixture of peat moss, compost, and natural fertilizer. The clods of clay don't actually break up totally, even with repeated slicing with a shovel, but...there are earthworms in the mulch, so maybe they'll make some headway with more compost....

Trellis gardening and pole beans

I'm using space between our house (in the mountains) and the next door apartment to set up trellises (and planting areas) for pole beans, yard-long beans, malabar spinach, etc.

The space gets full sun most of the day in the summer; we planted blueberries along the apartment side last year.

But challenged by space elsewhere (uh, I've filled up my raised stone beds already, probably overfilled them, to be sure). I'd be thrilled to have some vining vegetables in the corridor between our dwellings.

Cheap, probably fake, 'redwood' trellises are the supports; they're attractive, at least. And the apartment brick wall is not especially attractive, marked by cable and telephone lines, along with abandoned phone lines, etc.

Digging up the soil here isn't rewarding; beneath the decaying organic matter (leaves and bark mulch), there's more of the heavy gray to red clay, but at least this stuff is friable (unlike the compacted builder's fill in the front meadow). I've been 'fluffing' it up with soil conditioner (finely ground pine bark), and hoping for the best, as I've planted.

I've got a few more small 'beds' to dig up (I'll have a total of five trellis beds when I'm finished).