Hello or indeed help. Please advise.
We have a threefold problem,
1 the soil is basically subsoil dust, there's no worms and very little organic matter. We've added manure in the past, no difference so we need to add a lot of manure and go 2/3 spades deep digging manure in.
2 the bottom plot is contaminated (dead bed). Vehicles were parked on our plot so it's leakage from them. So we have to remove some soil, maybe the top spadeful? No idea how far to go down then add more soil and manure.
3 Lack of soil to replace what we take out of the bottom bed. Raspberries can't grow in pure manure (ta John, been reading your books) but rhubarb is very hungry (ta again John) and can according to family legend.
On the bottom dead/dread bed when crops (potatoes or peas) are growing you can see a line where the plants didn't do as well as the next row over. It's a very noticeable difference, one row over and the plants fail to thrive, they're are a fraction of the size and only live a few months before dying and rotting months sooner, June if we're lucky. We're not sure how much soil to take out...
so suggestions are
very welcome. We don't want to buy in soil.
Can we take out a spade or two's depth from the contaminated dead bed and replace it with "soil" or sandy dust stuff from the rhubarb bed. Mix in some home made compost we have as well as manure and then safely plant raspberries? We're worried the roots won't be burned. Then grow rhubarb in mostly well rotten horse manure? We have bareroot raspberry canes needing to go in asap.
The local stables have said help ourselves to their manure heaps, we're going for the well rotted stuff and hoping weed killer is limited. But we haven't seen it so it could be manure/manure and bedding of some form. It's free, some of it is rotted, there's loads of it. We need loads and it's what we can get. We are bearing in mind the aminopyralid, we don't think this place is that old and it's been over a decade since it was on the market. Finger's crossed I'm not being stupid.
Some of my family grew rhubarb in fresh horse manure in the past and got monster rhubarb so I hope that rotted will be fine. Has anyone else heard of this or think rotted will be fine?
We'll be adding remin as we're experience of it giving our plants a boost and maybe Growmore granules as well.