gypsum

[wazzadg44]

I am in Phitsanulok and have very heavy clay soil. I want to create some garden beds but need gypsum to use as a clay breaker before planting any thing. I have tried 4 nursery type businesses,Home Depot,Global House and the wife has also enquired at several farms near her village,all to no avail. Can any one help me with a nearby location that has gypsum.I have a car or mail order by bus delivery would be ok.

Thanks in advance.

[colinneil]

Try your local shops, i.e. builders merchants, feed stores or garden supplies.

We did here in Banphai, and found a little old back street shop had it.

[cooked]

I made lovely soil out of our clay (I won't even call it clay soil) by adding builders' sand and working it in. 2cm scattered over the surface did it. Sand has the advantage of increasing the acidity of the soil somewhat, I never liked the Gypsum method.

[wazzadg44]

Thanks to both of you-will- try both reccomendations

[drtreelove]

This company is in Chaing Mai. It is the largest and most complete fertilizer and pesticide dealer that I have found in Thailand. They have gypsum and they will ship to you. Khun Vipaporn is the English speaking Chinese-Thai owner.

If you want to go there you should contact me for exact directions.  It's a little challenging to find. 

 

Consider that gypsum is not enough to build healthy soil for your garden, and not always appropriate.  Soil testing will give  you a better picture of what is needed. Calcareous soils may not benefit from the added Ca that gypsum supplies. Incorporating organic matter is the best thing you can do. You can do that most economically by growing a green manure crop, making your own compost, or for small areas it may be affordable to import real compost. 

[islandguy]

On 5/3/2017 at 9:56 PM, drtreelove said:

This company is in Chaing Mai. It is the largest and most complete fertilizer and pesticide dealer that I have found in Thailand. They have gypsum and they will ship to you. Khun Vipaporn is the English speaking Chinese-Thai owner.

If you want to go there you should contact me for exact directions.  It's a little challenging to find. 

 

Consider that gypsum is not enough to build healthy soil for your garden, and not always appropriate.  Soil testing will give  you a better picture of what is needed. Calcareous soils may not benefit from the added Ca that gypsum supplies. Incorporating organic matter is the best thing you can do. You can do that most economically by growing a green manure crop, making your own compost, or for small areas it may be affordable to import real compost. 

Thanks  for the info on this supplier, Don. Do you have a recommendation in the CM area for soil and soil amendments testing? Thinking of things like our own compost and similiar things when I say amendments. Thanks 

[cooked]

23 hours ago, islandguy said:

Thanks  for the info on this supplier, Don. Do you have a recommendation in the CM area for soil and soil amendments testing? Thinking of things like our own compost and similiar things when I say amendments. Thanks 

Nothing wrong with adding organic material but experience in Europe showed me that any organic matter will be completely consumed in two years. In heavy clay soil, in addition, any material added may just stay buried there in an anaerobic state doing no good at all. Things must work even quicker here.

A head gardener that I knew added cow manure to his heavy soil for 40 years and was puzzled that the soil consistency didn't change.

There are two extremes in soil (as far as I am concerned): too heavy or too light, translated as too much clay or too much sand. I added river sand, which is mildly acidic to my very heavy soil (baked hard as a tile in summer, turned into a gluey sticky mass in the rainy season), which is calcareous. I took care to add gently until I got the right mix, about 2cm each time, took me three years. Today, after a heavy rainstorm I was able to walk over the soil to collect fruit, which would have been an awkward bare foot job a few years ago. I do add cow manure and compost where appropriate.

There is a cleansing product called Wixol which contains 20% Hydrochloric acid. It caused my soil to bubble away merrily when I added a few drops; this is no longer the case.

[JungleBiker]

I agree that for a garden, adding sand to clay to make a loamy soil makes sense. Adding sand and organic matter will probably give better results than either of them alone.  

 

You could also try carbonized rice husks - often used in Thailand for growing pot plants (mixed with other stuff). It's just one kind of material that is now called biochar (or charcoal). It can help modify the soil texture as well as do other things. 

Here's an interesting recent scientific article about biochar by a UK author: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd

 

I'm using charcoal dust from a village where everybody makes charcoal from scrap wood that they get free from a sawmill. They sell the dust for peanuts just to get rid of it. 

 

If you have the time and patience (which I don't), it would be better to mix the biochar with other stuff like manure, compost, cocopeat, rock phosphate, etc, and then add some Trichoderma and EM, and leave it to ferment, to boost or charge the biochar before it is applied to the soil. 

 

While you're mixing your sand, organic matter, etc, into your soil, you may as well also add in some rock phosphate. It's considerd organic and I heard it is available from the north of Thailand. Phosphate doesn't normally travel far through the soil so is best incorporated before growing your crops. 

 

 

 

 

 

[cooked]

4 hours ago, JungleBiker said:

I agree that for a garden, adding sand to clay to make a loamy soil makes sense. Adding sand and organic matter will probably give better results than either of them alone.  

 

You could also try carbonized rice husks - often used in Thailand for growing pot plants (mixed with other stuff). It's just one kind of material that is now called biochar (or charcoal). It can help modify the soil texture as well as do other things. 

Here's an interesting recent scientific article about biochar by a UK author: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd

 

I'm using charcoal dust from a village where everybody makes charcoal from scrap wood that they get free from a sawmill. They sell the dust for peanuts just to get rid of it. 

 

If you have the time and patience (which I don't), it would be better to mix the biochar with other stuff like manure, compost, cocopeat, rock phosphate, etc, and then add some Trichoderma and EM, and leave it to ferment, to boost or charge the biochar before it is applied to the soil. 

 

While you're mixing your sand, organic matter, etc, into your soil, you may as well also add in some rock phosphate. It's considerd organic and I heard it is available from the north of Thailand. Phosphate doesn't normally travel far through the soil so is best incorporated before growing your crops. 

 

 

 

Yes, I agree that charred rice hulls would probably do the job, although I think the soil would remain alkaline. Charcoal dust: never tried it.

"Can you add biochar to alkaline soils?

Most biochar trials have been done on acidic soils, where biochars with a high pH (e.g. 6 – 10) were used. One study that compared the effect of adding biochar to an acidic and an alkaline soil found greater benefits on crop growth in the acidic soil, while benefits on the alkaline soil were minor. In another study, adding biochar to soil caused increases in pH which had a detrimental effect on yields, because of micronutrient deficiencies which occur at high pH (>6). Care must be taken when adding any material with a liming capacity to alkaline soils; however, it is possible to produce biochar that has little or no liming capacity that is suitable for alkaline soils."

I had a huge pile of sand when I moved here and could only obtain limited amounts of biochar, so...

 

"