Seven Organic Gardening Tips To Improve Bad Soil The Natural Way
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
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What's the natural gardening solution?
Acquire several tons of old manure. Horse manure is best but any litter from a fowl or herbivore will do, in this emergency. Farmers are often glad to give it away. They may even bring it to you.
Blend it with grit and old leaves, if you can find them. It's rarely a good idea to dig leaves straight into the soil but they'll decay fast enough if interlaid with manure. You merely need plenty of innocuous, decaying muck that will bring life and air to the soil.
Till that manure into the ground or, to be lazy, spread it thinly on the top and hope the worms drag it down.
Get a lot of crude kitchen waste from a restaurant or pub. Ideal are vegetable peelings rather than plate scrapings, which will include meat and fish scraps. These will invite rats and crows.
But so long as they're buried under the soil, even meat scraps will do little harm. At this point, the object is not to grow food but to build a crude compost heap.
Dig that waste into the soil and toss as many worms on top as you can get. At worst, you can buy them from an angling shop. Red brandling worms are perfect and you can usually find them under piles of rotted leaves or lawn clippings.
Plant a green manure, like clover, alfalfa or even bush beans. In bad soil, beans won't grow much but you don't need to eat them. They develop nitrogenous nodules on their roots which will enrich the soil. When the plants are up, rake them into the ground, leaves and all.
Make an impromptu compost trench. Just dig a furrow and throw in all the degradable trash from your kitchen. Throw soil on the top as you go, to suppress the stench and deter pests. Once that trench is full, dig another trench beside it.
When your garden is replete with furrows, the trash in the first trench will have sunk down into a rough compost. Now it's ready to grow something sturdy in, like squash, sweet corn or potatoes.
By the time that rough soil is nearly ready to grow in, sow collards or spinach in it. These will flourish any where. They give you an edible green manure. You can cook the leaves or just till them into the soil to help its texture.
Another tip to improve the soil fast is to sow many peas in rows. Any bush variety will serve. They'll prop each other as they grow, so you need not support them. Of course, you won't get much food but their roots will nourish the soil.
This is a great idea early in the year because, once the peas are grown and out, you can sow fast-growing bush beans in their place that should be ready in two months.
Now you have more green manure to rake in - plus you can eat the beans as well!
Once the beans have been harvested, and the leaves and roots dug into the earth, you may have the opportunity to drop in a fall crop of garlic, cabbages, kale and late parsnips that will survive over winter.
Come next year, that poor soil should have become good enough so you can seriously consider growing more precious crops.
The main principle is to put as much degradable matter into that soil as you can. You shouldn't need to buy it. In the country, you can usually find animal waste. In the town, food waste can be collected from restaurants. Why not bring them an empty sack and uplift it each week, full.
You don't have to bury this waste deep. Eventually, it will decay and the worms will pull it under.
Don't stop working in that nutritious garbage and you will have a great growing area within two years. Although it began with builder's rubble!