 Growing Gardens
with Julia Hancock
Rich Earth
What goes on under the soil's surface is just as important, if not more so, as what goes on with the plants that grow above ground. Trouble is, because it's out of sight it's often out of mind. To have an abundant garden vibrant with colour and charm, we must also have soil which is teeming with life and health.
This is a good time to put some effort into the less glamorous side of gardening, although creating the perfect tilth can be rewarding in itself. We're all familiar with Peter Cundall sermonising about the benefits of compost and blood and bone and these are excellent products with gentle and slow-release benefits.
Less well known are products based on seaweed, fish meal, marine proteins and those comprising microbe concentrates. Volcanic minerals such as silica also improve soil structure, water holding capacities and productivity of impoverished soils and are worth investing in.
If all this sounds yummy to you, imagine what it's like for the worms! Soil additives contain useful trace elements, vitamins and bulk matter which absorb moisture and slowly decompose, releasing gasses and nutrients which are essential to those organisms which proliferate in a healthy soil. Just as we need a well-balanced and varied diet, so do they.
It's easy to tell whether your soil is dull and lifeless because usually it is infested with weeds. Even if your soil is capable of supporting many different types of plants, it would almost certainly benefit from the addition of some organic goodies. It's virtually impossible to add too much compost and economic constraints generally dictate how much or little blood and bone, pelletised poultry manure and cow and horse dung we can afford to purchase.
Keep your hard-working critters happy by improving their environment, and revel in the process of manually working the earth as have countless generations before us.
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