You only need to add Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals once.

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It is a permanent cure for dry and water repellent sand when used a directed. The best soil for lawns and gardens is a mineral rich loam soil, made of kaolin clay, silt, sand and humus.

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Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals improves sand by adding kaolin clay, silt, and a unique, scientifically tested balance of natural minerals - all of which guarantee an immediate great result.

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Adding organic matter is not the best way to permanently improve your soil as it eventually breaks down to an oily alkaline wax that coats the sand particles and causes water repellent soil. This is known as hydrophobic sand. Adding organic matter to a low fertility sand is actually creating the hydrophobic problem, as well as increasing the alkalinity of the soil which is a big problem that we face in Perth. The result is even less water holding capacity, and all the nutrition and humus leaches from the sand to the water table, then out

to the river systems.

 

Using Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals guarantees the ongoing reduction of the “wax load” in your soil thanks to the increased micro-organism activity. Science, backed up with real life results, shows that we need to increase the clay content to 5% by weight of the total soil mass. The amount of clay product you need therefore depends on the “clay %” of the product.

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Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals comes with an Accredited laboratory test result and Organic Allowed Input Certification. It is blended, and aged for over a year to ensure that every bag contains the same essential balanced ingredients, and is ready to release minerals to plants.

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The result not only holds onto more water, the beneficial minerals boost the numbers and variety of soil organisms which improves the overall health and vitality of your garden plants. It is a permanent improvement to the texture of sandy grounds, and in future you only need to add mulch to protect soil life. Vegetable gardens need a more intensive management regime including Soil Solver® Rock Minerals or Soil Solver® Compost Plus Minerals.

You will not get such a good result. See our Home page video where Trevor Cochrane from The Garden Guru's explains why other clays do not have the same benefits as kaolin clay.

Some clay products contain sodium, i.e. salt, which can really set your garden backwards! 

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Listen to Dr Dan Carter discussing water repellent soils.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Ukm3YULCjkSzvMmrHdVMT 

 

Montmorillonite clay doesn't naturally exist in soil. The properties of montmorillonite clay make it so that it does not stick to sand, only another montmorillonite clay particles.  This is why farmers use this clay type to seal dams, but this is not a trait we want in our soils.  Only kaolin clay can disperse into the existing soil and stick to sand and humus to form nature’s “peds of soil”.

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Kaolin clay has been shown in independent trials at the University of Wester Australia to be the best for curing water repellence, and field trials have shown that a 5% clay content can achieve a permanent cure (10kgs/sqm of Clay Plus Minerals). You can add more and further improve the performance of your soil. Click to read the West Australian Dept of Agriculture advice on soil improvement. Download our Fact Sheet here.

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Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals is a stable clay product, friable, easy to use and includes the entire spectrum of secondary and trace elements needed to keep plants in tip top health. The natural minerals attached to the clay lattice are immediately available to plants. All ingredients are naturally sourced and blended to a unique formula that improves soil and plant health.

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Clay products contain a percentage of clay, silt and sand.  The lower the clay and silt content, the more you will need to get the necessary permanent changes needed for our sands for long-term productive soil.  Only an Accredited lab testing to Australian Standards for soil will give an accurate level of clay and silt content of a product.  Below are independent tests of products where you will notice the clear advantage that Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals has with clay and mineral content.

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The more sand that is in a soil material, the more clay you need to add to achieve a 5% clay content.

Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals has a 50% clay content. Adding 10 kgs of Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals per square metre of sand will achieve a 5% clay content in your soil. In the short term, a lesser ratio of clay will help and be a temporary cure for water repellent soils, but in a year or two it will return to its natural state and you will need to start again.

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Below is a table of kgs/sqm of clay product needed to achieve the necessary 5% clay content.  50% clay content needs 10kg/sqm of clay, 30% clay content needs 16.7kgs/sqm of clay, 15% clay content needs 33.3kgs/sqm.   10% clay content needs 50kgs/sqm

Adding clay is only part of the story, you also need to feed the soil with organic matter. The best part of adding Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals is it helps hold the valuable humus in the soil so it becomes naturally darker and richer as time goes on.

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The more Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals you add, the more fertile the soil is. If the garden is on a new build site with 'fill sand' in it, you may also add some worm castings or microbial boosters to help kick start the soil life. 

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You can choose to add a little bit of Soil Solver® Clay Plus Minerals and our composts each year to gain the 5% clay and optimal quality, or bite the bullet and add it all at once (recommended). We advise against using a spent mushroom compost because of the chemicals added to it as part of the preparation to grow mushrooms.