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December: Enriching the Soil

Traditional gardeners (mostly men!) have long promoted the benefits of endless digging, double digging and more digging. I have never understood the point of too much digging, as not only do you end up with backache, you also kill lots of lovely worms and other useful nature. Having said that, to grow healthy vegetables, you do need to fertilise the soil somehow, and I do dig sometimes, mostly trenches to fill with goodies for my beans. Now is the time, therefore, to think about enriching the soil for next year’s crops, concentrating on areas you plan to grow greedy plants like beans, peas and brassicas, or where your soil is particularly heavy/claggy.

The way to do it without digging is to simply pile the area or bed well with compost, well-rotted manure, Church Meadow Mulch or even last years growbags. While you put your feet up over the winter, the frost, rain and those friendly worms get to work, and come the spring all you need do is give the area a quick fork over. Over several years you will notice the change in your soil, as it improves, lightens and loosens.

You’ve probably never seen anyone (well, maybe other than Monty Don) getting excited about home made compost, but I can assure you that I get a thrill every year when I start to distribute my "black gold"! The miracle of grass cuttings, kitchen peelings, other garden greenery, cardboard, cloth (it does need to be 100% natural fabric, as I have discovered!), and the contents of hen houses/guinea pig cages going into a heap, and coming out less than a year later as crumbly, black stuff ready to go onto the garden continually amazes me! There is plenty of advice about actually making compost on the internet and in books from the library, but I will say that all those plastic bags that say they are biodegradable obviously take longer than I leave my compost, and seed packets with foil linings do not dissolve either!

One last thought: to help protect your back, change your activity after every 20 minutes, even if you just stop digging, weeding or distributing compost, and walk around admiring your hard work!