Sensational Soil Series
Stephanie Hafferty explains how to to help boost natural resilience in your garden from the ground up…
Ask a group of ten gardeners the same question, and you’ll get ten different answers, but one thing I am sure we can all agree on is that the weather over the past few months has been very difficult. Endless rain, at times so torrential there has been serious flooding, combined with much milder than usual temperatures, has created challenges for home gardeners and farmers alike.
Weeds have made the most of mild, damp weather, continuing to germinate and grow long after we’d usually expect some respite from hoeing. The ground is saturated. Over wintering veg has been battered by high winds and rain as storm followed storm, and slugs have thrived, continuing to chomp away on our crops. Fortunately, crisp cold wintry weather has finally arrived, slowing weed growth and sending slugs into retreat.
At times driving rain created pools of water on my veg beds, so that the emerging broad beans and garlic resembledembled swamp plants. But once the rain subsided, the water quickly disappeared. A key reason why is that my garden here in Wales has been entirely created using nodig methods. Allowing the soil structure to remain intact (and undisturbed through digging) means that there is better drainage. Microscopic channels created by soil life including mycorrhizal fungi allows water to freely drain away naturally. I can walk on the beds even after the flooding without compacting them.
No-dig can’t prevent waterlogging in areas which are prone to heavy and persistent flooding (those areas require proper drainage, or raised beds, or both), but it can help our gardens otherwise.
Now it’s time to look forward to spring, and prepare the garden to be resilient against whatever the weather has in store for us this year. Here are some of my top tips for building and protecting soil.
Grow no-dig
Probably the simplest and most effective way to protect your soil, make it more resilient to changing weather and grow amazing crops, this ancient method of gardening varies according to the environment where you live. It involves simply spreading organic matter (a mulch) on the surface of the soil, and allowing the soil organisms to incorporate it. So if you’ve been digging your plot, all you need to do is stop digging, spread a mulch (compost works well in the UK) and get growing.
To transform weedy grass into a productive garden, remove any woody weeds such as brambles with a spade, cut the grass on a low setting, cover with cardboard (overlapping to prevent weeds sneaking through) and then cover that with around 5cm compost. Any kind of compost is fine. You can sow and plant directly into this.
Every year add a little compost mu
