i’m trying to improve the soil quality in my yard, it’s hard and clay-like and roots have a hard time going down below like 4 cm. i have cow patties, rice hulls, rinsed coco coir and some cardboard.
currently the plan has been to mix up the patties and rice hulls and bury that below ground (completed already), then mulch with the coir + hulls + patties, then finally cover with cardboard. the yard is small so not much cardboard involved. i’m growing cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and beans this year, they should have been in the ground already but i wanted to grow from seed and my cats got to the sprouts. so i gotta get new ones 
please tell me what i am missing or what i could do better.
it seems to me like you’ve done a lot for this season, in terms of soil conditioning. clayey soils are the most prone to compaction problems, so avoid working/tilling or even walking on the managed area when it’s wet. a decent guide for this is grabbing a clump of soil and forming it into a ball with your hand. if any of it sticking to your skin, it’s too wet. if it forms into a ball without breaking apart, it’s too wet. a lot of yards have compaction problems, because people do wack shit with yards. like park vehicles on them and christ knows what happened during home construction with heavy equipment and disturbance of layers etc.
you could try cover cropping a bed area with a tillage raddish late season, like a month before your first frost. so you have time to find a source and ship and look up resources. the high seeding rate for a 10’x10’ area is less than an ounce, so you could get pretty wild with a 1lb bag. getting wild with cover crops is fun, imo. because you get to see stuff grow and it’s doing work.
soil issues take time to correct, because it’s basically its own highly complex biome and its stewardship mostly about provisioning resources for the microbial activity to happen. you’re just showing up with the concrete mix. they build and live in the city.