Our soil is rubbish.   More dust than soil really, and very free draining dust at that.   We’re constantly chanting our mantra “improve the soil, improve the soil,” and have shovelled tonnes of compost onto the borders we’ve added to the garden recently, but there’s still some way to go….

Looks alright to me...

This was brought home to us last week when we revisited a garden in which we’d installed some borders last year.   We don’t often get the chance to review borders after we’ve designed and installed them (and often find ourselves worrying about their upkeep and performance as a result) but we have a small number of clients who call us back from time to time to do extra work, and it’s aways interesting to see how things have progressed.

One of these clients lives 45 minutes south of here, and has soil in their garden.   Real earthy stuff, loamy, with body, and nutrients, and everything.   The sun always shines in their garden too (tho’ we’ll concede that this is really just because we only make the trip if the weather is nice and we can be sure to get a good days work in!). And their plants grow, properly.

The plants in our garden grow properly too of course, but there is a noticeable difference between the two, and it can only be down to the soil.   We’ve duplicated many plants in both gardens, and while they all look fine and dandy viewed in isolation, we repeatedly found ourselves thinking “that’s doing better than at home….”

We have another client for whom we built a new border a couple of years ago, and were back in their garden last week too.  In their case we imported 20 tonnes of topsoil to make up a new raised bed, and the plants in there are doing very well.    The rest of the garden however is not – it’s a new-build house, on the site of an old haulage yard, and while the builder obviously imported some topsoil, we can’t help thinking it must have been poor quality, or that it’s just been dumped onto whatever surfaces were there before – concrete, tarmac, gravel, 50 years worth of oil contaminated and compacted soil?   The builder “landscaped” the garden with amenity type shrubs and they are coping, but that’s about the best you can say for them.

“Feed the soil, not the plant” sounds like a phrase conceived by one of the more puritanical and masochistic wings of the organic gardening movement (unless you like shoveling soil conditioner of course) but it really isn’t.   If you want a quality product, you need quality ingredients, and soil is the key ingredient in a garden!

So back to our mantra – “improve the soil, improve the soil”……we’re lucky in the sense that the nursery and garden  produce far more compostable waste than we could ever use, so we have an inexhaustible supply of soil conditioner.   And it looks as if mulching is going to feature on our “to do” list for some time to come.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 18:58 and is filed under General gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.