Feeding the Soil

There is an old adage “Feed the soil, not the plants” which makes sense to me.  Here is how I go about it.

Fertilizers            Nowadays I grow my veg adding no artificial fertilizer, and minimal amounts of natural fertilizer to the soil. My aim is to eventually add none at all. I haven’t always done it this way. I still have half a tub of Growmore in the shed that I used to sprinkle around every now and then, if I remembered, before sowing or planting. But then I read somewhere that soil which has received a lot of artificial fertilizers tends to see a diminishing earthworm population. I haven’t seen any serious research to back this up, but I don’t want to take the risk – I need my worms! (And anyway, on a point of principal, natural must be better than artificial.)

I subsequently bought a pack of Fish, Blood & Bone granules, and a tub of organic chicken manure pellets (organic because I don’t want to support battery farming in even the smallest way).  My aim is to use these only as a transitional measure, until my rotation has gone a full cycle, and each of the quarters has been enriched with manure. 

However, my soil is very light and riverbed silty sandy, so nutrients leach away more rapidly than would be the case on heavier soils. I am not sure the effects of the manure will still be felt 4 years on. So the soil at the end of the rotation may well need some kind of boost – especially the root beds for which the manure will be an ancient memory.  Hopefully I will eventually have enough compost to afford to give the roots a couple of inches before sowing or planting. I don’t yet though.

DIY Fertilizer - The clever legumes            The rotation I am using at the moment delivers 5 crops in a four-year cycle

            Potatoes – alliums – legumes – brassicas – other

The legumes occupy the soil 1 or 2 years after the potatoes, when there should still be enough residual nutrients in the soil to get them going. But legumes have the amazing knack of catching all the nitrogen they need from the air. Not only that, but they squirrel it away in their roots for the future.

This means that after the peas and beans have been harvested, I can cut the stalks off at or just below soil level, and leave the roots there. The following crop will be a brassica, which will happily use up the nitrogen released to the soil as the legume roots rot away.

Clever little legumes!

After trying this approach last year I have realized that it is doubly important to keep the pea and bean beds well weeded. If there is a mass of weed once the legumes have been harvested and the stalks cut down, it is very difficult to avoid pulling out their roots while weeding. French and runner beans, and peas are fairly easy to deal with. But the broad beans are harder, as I grow them in a block into which it is difficult to reach to weed. Maybe I should cut the stalks down twice – once leaving about 6 inches, then weed, then the final cut to soil level.

Soil Improvers            There are many different kinds of soil improvers – some free, some expensive, and some better then others. The main thing is to get as much as possible into the soil.  These are the ones I have used.

(a)            Home Compost            I compost all of my kitchen waste, except for meat or fish remains (which would attract rats).  I don’t have a lawn, but I have some neighbours who do, and I have persuaded them to give me their lawn mowings rather than pay for a brown bin. I ask only that they don’t give me the first cut of the lawn after any sprays (moss killer, etc) have been used.  I also take from them any other compostable garden waste, eg old bedding plants, autumn leaves, etc. I ask them not to put in anything thorny, such as brambles or roses, that might cut my hands.  Anything that is too woody to compost I put aside for the wood-burner.

I don’t turn my compost.  I don’t add lime, or any extra water, and only pay the slightest attention to balance of brown and green. Neither do I stack things up in piles to make a heap when ready.  Everything goes in at the time I need to dispose of it. I empty the entire teapot, stale tea as well as teabags, into it every morning. I also wash out the kitchen compost bin and empty that in too. These two actions seem to keep the compost sufficiently moist. Each time I add kitchen waste, or lawn mowings, I scrunch up some newspaper and throw it in to add balance. This laissez-faire system has always worked for me, but then with 3 bins, I don't need to be in a hurry.

I have three “dalek” compost bins, and when one is full, I leave it to mature and move on to the next. I have learnt that we need some sign to indicate which bin to use, otherwise other family members get confused and throw kitchen waste into maturing bins. After a month or 2, small red worms, called brandling worms, magically appear and colonize the bin. (I have no idea where they come from – this happens even if the bin is sitting on a concrete base!).  (My bins rest on a base of chicken wire over soil, to discourage rats, which like nothing better then to set up residence in a nice warm compost bin over the winter.)

After about a year, the bin is ready. The contents will, depressingly, have shrunk to about a third of their original size, but will be sweet-smelling, brown and crumbly. The only thing still recognizable are the fragments of eggshell, which I leave, and the inevitable bits of plastic and metal (eg bottle tops, chocolate wrappers etc), which always seem to find their way in. 

I use this compost if I need something I I hope will not have many weed seeds, such as the asparagus bed, or the seedbed. 

(b)  Leaf mold             Every autumn I collect 30 or more bin bags full of leaves.  There is an area of town I regularly drive through which has broad avenues lined with huge, majestic sycamore trees. When they shed their leaves, I fill the back of Clio (our hatchback) with 9 or 10 bags full at a time.  If I time it right, usually mid-November, the council will have swept the leaves into piles ready for me, waiting to be collected.

The traditional way of using leaves is to make leaf mold rather than composting them. The easy way to do this is to water the leaves in the bin bags, tie the top, punch a few holes all round and leave for a year or two.  Leaf mold is meant to be good to improve the texture of the soil, but does not contain many nutrients.  I have tried this in the past, but nowadays I use the leaves in a different way.

(c)  Chicken compost       Instead of making leaf mold I  throw a bag or two a week of the leaves at the feet of my hens. They get very excited about this, and scratch away for hours looking for titbits.  I also throw them any remains from spent vegetable plants, weeds, (except perennial roots or seedheads), and the bedding straw when I sweep out the chicken house.  I even throw in the stalks of old brassica plants, though after then hens have picked them clean I remove them to dry for burning. (It is possibly to mash them to smithereens with a mallet and then add to the compost, but burning works for me.)

The hens scratch and peck and pee and poo on all of this, breaking it down and mixing it up, and accelerating the composting process enormously. Gradually the soil level rises as more and more stuff get thrown in.  A bye-product of this approach (I hope) is that in this way the chickens are constantly living on a new surface underfoot. I haven’t the space at the allotment to move them to a fresh site every few months, as recommended, to avoid a build up of pests or diseases. By constantly introducing fresh organic matter for them to tread in, I aim to give them fresh ground underfoot all the time without actually having to move them.

Then every few moths I dig the chicken run down to the original soil level, and barrow the contents to one of the compost bins. (At the allotment I have four bins made of old wooden pallets, secured in place by wooden stakes through the corners.) At this stage it consists of a sodden mess in various stages of decay, with a typical chicken manure  whiff to it. However, after a few months it has changed into beautiful, brown, crumbly, compost.  I know that it is likely to contain a fair few weed seeds though, so I use it where that is not so critical. For example I recently used the chicken compost when making planting holes for this years cucurbits (cucumbers, squashes, etc)

(d)            Animal Manure            I also import manure from outside.  Contrary to popular belief there is a lot of manure around for grabs: cow farms out of town, and riding stables in town being the most likely sources. The only problem is getting the stuff from the farm or stable to the allotment.  (Mrs Spud is tolerant of Clio often containing allotment odds and ends, but even she draws the line at using it to transport sacks of stinking manure.) One year I paid someone with a pickup to collect from a nearby riding stable. Last year a friend offered his trailer and together we filled 50 bags of cow manure from a farm  and delivered them in 2 loads.

(Incidentally I would recommend keeping the manure in bags while it matures rather than emptying it into a heap.  It seems to rot down equally quickly, or at least quickly enough, and saves a lot of effort when it comes to carrying it the beds.) 

A word of warning when it comes to importing manure: there have been a few cases of manure being contaminated with a particularly persistent herbicide recently. As a result some allotmenteers have found their plots sterile, at least temporarily, after applying this tainted manure. I would hope that the cow farmer would know if his manure is dodgy and not pass it on to us. I’m not so sure that stable owners would know so much about their straw though. If in doubt I suppose it would be best to try some out for growing on a small scale first. Personally I have never bothered and not had any problems.

I use imported manure exclusively on my potato beds.

(e)            Brown Bin Compost            Nowadays most councils collect (for a fee) garden waste in brown bins. This is then taken to a central depot where it is all shredded and composted into compost, sometimes sold in garden centres as “soil improvers”.

For a while our council allowed allotmenteers to collect as much of this as they wanted from the depot for free, on production of the allotment contract.  So for a couple of years I filled Clio with bags of the stuff, a dozen or so at a time.  (Matured compost like this was much less offensive then manure.)  I probably overdid the weight though, and at times was resting on the suspension, so had to drive very carefully to get it home.

However, a couple of years ago, when money became tighter all over, they started charging. It was still quite reasonable – about £10 a ton – but unfortunately they wouldn’t let me collect my ton in 4 visits. They used a weighbridge, and I would have had to pay the same no matter how little of the ton I had managed to load on each time. Nevertheless that is still an option for the future. I wonder how Clio would fancy a trailer?