Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Welcome => New Across The Site => Topic started by: John on July 03, 2020, 13:38
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When moving house or taking on a new plot, often the soil is in poor condition – depleted nutrients and lack of humus creating a poor growing environment. What to do to improve things and reinvigorate the soil.
Reinvigorating Your Soil (https://www.allotment-garden.org/garden-diary/6957/reinvigorating-soil/)
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When moving house or taking on a new plot, often the soil is in poor condition – depleted nutrients and lack of humus creating a poor growing environment. What to do to improve things and reinvigorate the soil.
Reinvigorating Your Soil (https://www.allotment-garden.org/garden-diary/6957/reinvigorating-soil/)
Yes a bit good advice there! Interesting that you mention a hard pan under the topsoil . I have been suffering very poor drainage and eventually moved to raised bed no dig principles. Fo years I have been using a rotavator to prepare my soil. This year it has not been used but there was a large'ish area left after I created my raised beds so rather than get the rotavator out I dug it with a fork. I was shocked to find just how shallow my topsoil was... 150 - 200mm in some places then a heavy yellow subsoil. I would hesitate to say clay because when it is broken up it is like a hard compressed sand. Anyway if I had not gone no dig I would have ditched the rotavator nad done just as you say double dig the ground bursting open the hard sub soil with a pick and getting plenty of manure into it. It would have been hard work but I think well worth the effort... thank god I went not dig :lol:
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Picking the best solution for you and your conditions is a bit of an art. I found double digging two clay plots hard work the first time but not so hard the second or third. Not that I double dug every year. After six years I'd a deep, healthy soil across the plots although I resorted to raised beads at the lowest end of one of the plots because of water logging.
Here the conditions are very different. A light, poor soil that's been ill-cared for pasture for about 50 years. Raised beds got me growing in months but in other areas I'm stealing ideas from permaculture and no-dig methods. It's impossible to dig anyway as there are so many stones in the soil the spade won't go in. Eventually I'll rotavate and start the endless job of picking out the stones.
Controlled mowing emulating mob-grazing has started to show benefits to the grass areas - would be a lot better if I'd used sheep and hens but we do what we can with the resources we have..