From the Vault: The Heart of Clay

Originally published 2024-10-07. By JPI Biodynamics.

by Dennis Klocek, AB # 13, Fall 1995

It has been said by soil scientists that, by working the soil, it is possible to do in a few years what would take nature thousands of years to accomplish. Intensive soil cultivation and the addition of proper soil amendments can aggregate sandy soil to give it more crumb, or open heavy lime marl to give it more porosity. In both instances, when the proper soil consistency is maintained, the soil is said to have heart.

Among soils, only alluvial clay loams have this heart naturally. Clay is the heart of heart in the soil. But, as it is with everything in nature, there can be too much of a good thing. To much clay can produce a dense, sour soil in which water stagnates in puddles, plants rot from the roots, and growth is slow and uncertain, especially during cool seasons. Heavy clay heats up slowly. And if it ever dries out, it takes a concerted effort to penetrate it with water, since clay tends to shed water rather than absorb it when dry. 

All things being equal, however, clay has a great potential to establish heart in the soil since it is absorptive, plastic, and chemically dynamic, when trying to overcome soil deficiencies.

A gardener has a bit of an advantage over a farmer, if the clay soil is truly impervious. A farmer deals with clay in selecting rotations of plants, which can pulverize the soil and break up the clods. In the west, where alkalinity also works against soil porosity, gypsum is often added because its sulfur content connected to the calcium (lime) brings the pH closer to neutral. This encourages heart in clay. Through proper plant rotations, as well as the application of rock powders, compost, and very careful tillage, a farmer can turn clay into soil in a number of years.

In a garden, however, it is possible to greatly accelerate this process by employing homeopathy and an intensive tillage system. Clay soil worked in this way can turn from dense fire clay (kaolin) to porous garden loam in a year and a half of systematic work.

Suppose we wish to plant fall cabbages in a clay bed in which nothing will grow. Starting in fall or mid-winter (if you can get to your soil), use a spade to dig up the topmost layer. Slice the clods with the spade as you apply powdered gypsum and a one-inch layer of peat moss. Let the rain work this in until the spring. At the first turnings, try to incorporate any weeds that might be growing on the surface into the clods as you chop them up with the spade. The gypsum will help them rot and some worms will be attracted to the area.

During the winter, collect eggshells and then pulverize the shells until you have a few ounces of them. (Running them through a Corona hand-powered grain mill makes a coarse powder.) Take five tablespoons of this powder and triturate (pulverize) it in a mortar and pestle for an hour. Take a half teaspoon of this fine powder and add it to another five tablespoons of the coarse powder and triturate for an additional hour. Then once again, take a half teaspoon of the fine power, add it to five tablespoons of coarse powder, and triturate for another hour. This is a process for potentizing eggshell to a 3x potency. It is also possible to add a half tablespoon (1 ½ teaspoons) of basalt powder to each trituration cycle (1x-2x 3x) and potentize the egg and rock  powder simultaneously.

Take the 3x fine powder and add it to ¾ bucket of cow manure. Coarse eggshell powder and basalt powder can also be added to the triturated powder and the manure. Mix the powders and the manure for twenty minutes. Honey added to the cow manure makes the mixing go much easier. In this way you can mix in a bucket.

Bury a small nail keg, which is open at the bottom and the top, in the ground. Place half of the manure in the keg. Make five holes in the manure mass, and insert the BD compost preparations, BD 502 to 506, into these holes. Place the rest of the manure in the barrel and make holes again in the mass. Now pour in the valerian preparation, BD 507. Cover the keg loosely and let this ferment until it loses its manure smell. The trituration of the eggshell and rock powder aids the fermentation and helps the next step of the process when the barrel compost (which is what the mixture is called) is stirred in water so that it can be used as a soil drench for incorporating plant materials into the clay in spring.

Also during the winter, take 50 pounds of fresh or 20 pounds of powdered or granulated kelp and ¼ bale of either shredded alfalfa or alfalfa feed pellets and place them together into a 50-gallon barrel and cover with water. Try to use rain, spring, or creek water for this ferment. To shred alfalfa, get a 120-pound bale of alfalfa and cut it lengthwise into three-inch twigs with a chainsaw. In the spring, when the kelp has become rotten and the alfalfa has liquefied, put a gallon of this tea into a wheelbarrow full of shredded alfalfa. Put a few big stones on the alfalfa to weigh it down and fill the wheelbarrow with water. Let this “sauerkraut” ferment overnight. In the morning the kelp and fermented alfalfa will have formed a beautiful, clear brown tea in the wheelbarrow.

Also that evening, after preparing the alfalfa, put two cups of the straight kelp/alfalfa juice and a walnut-sized lump of the barrel compost together in a five-gallon bucket also to ferment overnight. In the morning, add two pints of the wheelbarrow tea to the concentrated juice and barrel compost mixture. Stir for a few minutes. Foam and bubbles should appear as you break the vortex to create chaos. Add another two pints of the wheelbarrow tea and stir again. Repeat this procedure for twenty minutes, always adding the tea to the concentrate and then stirring.

This procedure in alchemy, or homeopathy, is a process known as forming an “essence.” The idea is to try to lift the vibration of the materials by a rhythmic opening. This is what we want the clay to do. We want it to open up. We have started by opening up the egg and basalt through trituration. We then open up the kelp/alfalfa by first fermenting them in water to form a concentrate. After that, we proceed to open the concentrate in the wheelbarrow where we steep a tea from the original plant. The “opening” concentrate helps to open the green alfalfa as it steeps in the wheelbarrow overnight. This tincture is opening on many levels. This is our diluent.

We then take the barrel compost and open it up into a diluent. The forming of the foam of bubbles by the viscous nature of the kelp creates infinite spherical surfaces in the liquid, further opening it to allow the water to absorb the forces released as the manure/eggshell/basalt mixture is rhythmically diluted.

By adding the diluent to the stirring mixture, we are adding a further rhythmic potentization layer into the time structure of the mixing. We want all elements of the procedure to be harmoniously expanding. A system like this is much more potentizing than simply stirring a substance for twenty minutes in tap water. The goal, again, is to have all elements rhythmically expanding simultaneously.

The potentized liquid is then put into a sprayer and the tillage can begin.

Open the bed all over with a spade and slice open the clods. With a fork, dig a trench at one end of the bed. Line the trench with the soaked alfalfa from the wheelbarrow. Sprinkle in peat moss (about a half inch). Add two inches of compost. Spray the mixture and the soil all over the trench with the contents of the sprayer. Fork in about three inches of soil. Repeat, so that each trench has two layers of soaked alfalfa. You may also want to add some oyster shell lime to offset the acid from the peat and the rotting process. Work the whole bed, double digging, layering, and spraying. This sounds intensive, and it is, but it works miracles in clay soil.

At midsummer, just as the cabbage seedlings are being pricked out, mix up another soil drench and spray and incorporate another inch or so of compost into the top four inches of the bed. At all times keep the soil covered with a hay mulch so that the clay stays moist and cool. The worms will come into the bed, growing robust and powerful on a diet of alfalfa. As they move along the tunnels left by the rotting alfalfa stems, the heart of the soil will start to pulsate. Springtails by the thousands will be seen in every forkful of soil. We regularly find nightcrawlers the thickness size of a half inch rope at a length of five inches moving through beds treated in this way.

The key to bringing out the best in the clay is the rhythms of substances that are being induced to expand in ordered sequences. When these rhythmically expanding substances are introduced into the clay, it responds in a rhythmic way by dynamically uniting the lime pole and silica pole.

When this rhythmic play is present in an open clay soil, the true heart of the soil is beating to the rhythms of the forces flowing through the Earth.

Dennis Klocek formerly taught Goethean Studies at the Rudolf Steiner College in California. He is an internationally known lecturer, teacher, and author. His website is soilsoulandspirit.com.