How To Identify Clay in Nature

The one guy that didn't like this video probably found a bunch of potters, digging for clay in his front yard, the day after this was released. 😆

What a super cool guy, simply teaching the world about self sufficiency and craftsmanship. Cheers to you bud 🤎

I went out clay hunting today. The creek I had my eye on was virtually inaccessible due to thick brush. Then I spotted a nearby irrigation ditch, bone dry...and it looked like the earth that the ditch-digger tossed up to the sides was clay. The bottom also looked like clay but was a little questionable in color. It was hard, but looked like the cracked clay; some was in odd shapes it had taken and dried. I gathered some and came home...felt good in the water. I've strained it (it had seashells in it because we live IN a prehistoric lake bed) and pillow-cased it and it's hanging. If it's clay, I've found a gold mine! lol

Am I the only one that wants to hang out and run around the desert with this guy 😆 🤣 😂 Absolutely awesome 👌 👏 👍

Thank you so much for addressing the signs of natural clay in a DRY environment. So many videos feature people reaching into a stream bed, grabbing a handful of clay and showing how to do a coil test. Some of us don't have a lot of water nearby!

I'm taking a ceramics class at my school, and I decided to look up some pottery YouTubers. I'm afraid I've become addicted to your channel... lol! Keep up the great work!

There’s this creek by my house that has veins of PURE gray clay! It even comes with a bit of sand mixed in!

Great video. You may also find gray clay on the sides of the rivers and streams. Clay sticks to your tools and is hard to wash off. Here you must be careful because darker, black colored sticky soil may be silver bearing soil, not a clay. Either way you win.

We fossil hunt at Wilson's Claypit in Grosvenor, TX. The clay is purple and green. Shades from lilac to aubergine and light sage to teal. As you drive to it you can see the purple and green hills of mined materials.

I am from (and still live) in New Mexico. I guess I’ve been looking at clay my whole life. It all looks so similar and very familiar to me now after seeing this. Can’t wait to get out and find me some. Thank you!

this video and channel is a such a blessing, clay is truly an incredible technology from nature

I love your channel so much I enjoy creating art with clay so much for so long i was convinced that BUYING clay was the only way (and being honest i don't always have the possibility 💸) you opened my eyes! Not only that, but the idea of doing a little adventuring to find my own clay is amazing✨ Edit: I live in the Patagonia, and for a long time in ancient B.C. times a large portion of the land was completely under water I was living surrounded by clay!

Hi, I live in Oregon. We had one of the wettest springs on record. It rained the first 3 weeks of June 2022, almost every day. The last two years were like living in California, much warmer & dryer than normal. Even got evacuated for fires in 2020. I love putting in a vegetable garden and it was just too wet to plant my tomatoes & zucchini in my garden, except for a couple raised beds. It was 92° yesterday. I was out trying to amend my soil in the garden so I could plant some of my tomato plants. On average I would get my garden tilled by Mothers Day. I was wanting to go no till this year. All this additional rain has made gardening nearly impossible. As I was digging yesterday preparing soil to plant 2.5 foot tall tomato plants the soil was still hard & wet as it only stopped raining about 4 days ago. When I cut in with my shovel, it reminded me of clay in my pottery class my Senior year of high school, several decades ago. I thought, add water to mix in this compost because It's so hot now the tomatoes need to keep hydrated or they might die in this heat. What a mess! Bad idea. We will see how hard it is today. Last year I had an area of my garden I didn't plant so I tilled in wood shavings as an experiment thinking after a year it would break down and loosen the clay soil, No sign of it, it disapeared. I add compost and composted steer & chicken manure to the holes I dig for tomatoes every year. This year the clay is so expanded from months of rain I've decided I need to start extracting some of the clay every year and making things out of it. I have lots of buckets now. It's going to be 98°+ today. So I don't know if I will get much done, but your video has given me a whole new perspective on my clay dilemma. If life gives you lemons you need to learn how to make lemonade right? Who knows I may have some fantastic clay here, I know I sure have a lot of it. My garden has almost no rocks, I removed the few it had over the last 20 years. Pottery was my favorite class in high school. The only class I got A+ all year. Happy Summer everyone! I'm a new subscriber, Thank you for your videos!

you are my favorite youtube channel hands down! your videos have helped me in so many ways , financially,spiritually and, reconnecting with art and nature. sometimes personally, being in nature isn’t enough for me to get out my head. now everytime i go out, it’s an adventure. thank you

The gist of this video is this: to find clay=look for craggily ground where waterbeds are/were. This was very informative and will help me survive in the future.

I live in norway and i will for sure be trying this out next year when the frost is gone!

Man, this is amazing info. Thank You! Watched your other vid about processing wild clay too - I had no idea clay is simply defined by particle size!

Andy, you really are just describing all the dirt in Oklahoma. Doing some research to find some natural clay to make some simple vessels as a hobby. Slowly finding out that I could likely dig a hole anywhere here in OK and find something usable.

Where I live in southcentral Pennsylvania, I am located next to a creek, and off the side of the creek there is an old water raceway cut into the ground that feeds water into an old flower mill that was turned into a house. In that raceway, there is so much water, silt, mud, and broken-down leaves that have been collected over many years, from flooding all the way back to colonial times. It's so deep that if you walk in it, you will get stuck and sink into it up to your arms. The water raceway never drys out, so every year a new layer is added from flooding. I have used it for making clay once, and I was surprised at how well it worked. I just threw a bucket in and let it sink, then dried it out, crushed it up into a fine powder to separate it from any of the decomposing leaves and sticks, and then added water to it. Also, right next to this location, 120 yards away, there used to be a native village, and it would not be surprising if they even used it for making pottery.

i love your channel! just found you, and it gets me so excited to do some pottery. I grew up next to a river, and all our garden soil was extremly clay-y. i once tried making a little pot out of the garden soils just as it was, and fired it in the wood stove. it worked out, it had one crack, but otherwise held up, which for totally unprosessed clay with no added sand is pretty darn good. i gonna go visit my dad and steal a few buckets of dirt! :D