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Second….. build organic matter. Period. ...
Put high residue cover crops in there. Soil builders…, examples are rye, corn, sorghum/Egyptian wheat, switch, etc. ... Keep things growing there as much of the year as possible and always have soil covered with residue.
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Stealing parts of Skip's reply above, I completely agree with the above, especially the bolded parts. We just planted 1000 rhizomes of Miscanthus this past weekend. (Our first time doing so.)
Our method, modeled after an approach that I saw here on IW about a week ago now, was to:
1. Mow whatever was present down pretty short. Most of which, I had mowed last fall and/or over a month ago.
2. Till our strips to be planted.
3. Run a "middle buster" single blade plow through the 6' wide tilled strip, two times, making two furrows about 24" apart from one another.
4. Lay rhizomes in the "troughs" spaced about 18"ish from one another.
5. Using my new, handy dandy landscaping rake 3 point attachment, cover the troughs by scraping the loose soil back over the rhizomes. I would make a couple of passes to get it fairly smooth.
6. Drive the ATV over the recovered troughs to pack the soil some over the newly planted rhizomes.
This method seems to have worked very well, although time will tell as these things grow...or not. But...we had VERY different experiences with different areas that we planted.
The key difference was where we planted that HAD NOT been planted in a rye mix at multiple and various times over the years it was "clumpy" and it was hard to get good, consistent furrows because we have heavy clay soil too.
However, where we planted that HAD BEEN in rye/clover mix over the years, that soil worked up like butter. The difference in soil quality, tilth, between the non-rye areas and the rye areas was very dramatic.