How to improve your soil

Organic matter and growing green manures will help

THE best way to improve your soil is to fork in lots of well-rotted compost or farmyard manure (generically known as ‘organic matter’).

You are not likely to be able to make enough compost to improve all the soil in your garden but even one compost heap is a good place to start. We have a dual heap, with one bin rotting down while the other is topped up, and we treat our soil in rotation, one bed in spring, another in the autumn and so on.

The compost is a mix of green kitchen peelings, woody prunings and grass mowings, forked over regularly and covered with plastic sheeting to keep it warm in winter, left open to the available rain in summer.

It takes around six months for a bin to rot down completely and we then bag it up or spread it directly over the soil, fishing out woody remnants and anything that hasn’t broken down.

Making compost reduces the number of trips to the recycling depot and saves money on green waste collection and commercial soil improvers.

Because our soil is relatively poor, it needs more than compost to make it nutritionally rich and moisture retentive.