Black Gold

To dig or not to dig? There are several schools of thought when it comes to choosing how to manage your soil. Traditional veg growing practises digging or turning your soil to create that desirable, workable ground that gardeners crave. Then, by incorporating organic matter during the winter months, you replace lost nutrients, improve drainage and help the condition of the your growing medium. Most home and market growers favour this conventional approach, as it is what most of us have always done, and can be mechanised on a larger scale.

But can you achieve the same without digging? Instead of cultivating the ground and adding compost, you work from the surface up, layering a generous mulch of organic matter on to your beds each year. This builds fertility, maintains structure, retains water and helps prevent weed growth, with the added bonus of not having to dig it over. If you are building beds from scratch, laying cardboard down before the compost can help prevent perennial weeds from growing through. Having grown veg for years by digging obligingly, I was blown away by the results when I first adopted this method - and my back thanked me too.

Some of us are fortunate to have deep rich soil that is easily worked and improved (I don’t count myself amongst these lucky ones). If you know your soil to be difficult to work or you have a smaller urban garden with more rubble than earth, a no-dig approach might be right for you. The limiting factor with this method is that it requires much larger quantities of composted material - I recommend a minimum of 2-inches applied each year. But because it enables a quick start and produces increased yields, in my opinion, it pips digging at the post!

Making your own compost is recycling at its best. All the leftover material from the previous season can be converted into the life source for the next year’s crops.

Site your compost bin away from the house and in an area that is no good for growing. I recommend a three-stage composting system, turning one box into the next. This turning is vital - doing this once every few months aerates the material and speeds up decomposition. It is important to add a variety of plant material to your compost – mix greens (nitrogen) and browns (carbon), and spread it all out in even layers, rather than piles. All raw veg waste from the garden and kitchen can be added, leaving out cooked food, meat and dairy to avoid attracting rats. Chop up very woody material with a shredder or secateurs to further increase the speed of the composting process. Build your heap onto bare earth to allow worms to get in and excess water to drain away. The material you use to build your compost bin from is up to you. Most people choose wood as it is cheap and durable, but it will rot over time; I recommend lining your bins with stockboard made from recycled silage wrap. This will protect any wood from rotting out and will stand the test of time. Some people use chicken wire supported with stakes or recycled pallets to pen it all in - it all works, but the important thing to remember is to contain the heap; don’t just leave a pile in the corner of the garden. This will make better compost fast. I would advise supplementing your homemade compost with some additional organic matter. You can purchase organic compost from the garden centre, but if you have space, adding some bags of manure to your heap will bulk it out.  For a smaller garden, a barrel-sized rotary composter is your best bet, as you can turn the material regularly, having the same effect as aerating. By following the same rules as the three-stage system, this produces good quality compost fast.

After 8-10 months you should have some lovely dark, sweet smelling compost perfect for adding as a mulch or incorporating into your soil. Good compost shouldn’t be wet, and I often find it benefits from a sift through as there are bound to be twigs that haven’t fully composted.

Using homemade compost for propagating can cause problems however - there will inevitably be weed seedlings lurking therein. Although a good hot heap should kill off most weed pathogens, I would always recommend using sterile organic seed compost for starting off your seeds.

This post originally appeared as an article in the February 2019 edition of the Bridport Times and can be read online at www.bridporttimes.co.uk.