Your garden’s most important component is its soil. Whether you garden in containers on a fifth floor balcony, on an allotment, or on a half-an-acre of rural garden, the medium your plants are raised in is crucial to their good health.
Despite appearances, soil is not inert. It is a living ecology made up of minerals, water, air, organic matter and living organisms. It’s said that a mere teaspoon of healthy soil contains more micro-organisms than there are people on the planet.
But unless you take care of your soil - nurture, enhance and protect it - its condition and fertility will deteriorate. The garden centre shelves are creaking under the weight of products that will promise to boost your soil’s health but organic methods are not only trendy, they are tried and tested over centuries.
In summer, when your beds and borders are brimming with plants and there’s a canopy protecting the earth, you needn’t overly concern yourself with its wellbeing. However, over the coming weeks as annuals die and perennials retreat underground, your soil becomes more exposed to the elements.
Heavy rain and strong winds will not only erode your soil by physically moving particles but will rob it of nutrients, which will leech out over time.
There are several steps you can take to help minimise the impact of weathering, some cruder and less hands-on than others.
The most effective method for retaining your soil’s goodness, with the added bonus of suppressing weeds, is mulching.
A mulch is any permeable material, usually chipped, that provides a thickish over-layer on top of bare ground. It doesn’t have to be biodegradable but for the purpose of today’s lesson, it should be.
The blanket of mulch is applied in early autumn to protect the soil from erosion, to insulate it from frost damage, and to reduce weed growth.
The organic mulching material can range from leaves or leaf mould, bark chips, sawdust, straw or compost. It should be spread on the soil surface around and between plants, to a depth of 5-10cm.
The fact that it’s biodegradable means it’ll rot down in situ and be worked into the soil over time by worms and other small creatures. It will also enable diminutive spring-flowering bulbs like snowdrops and crocuses to poke their heads through unhindered.
In vegetable beds, where aesthetics aren’t of equal priority it’s easier to improvise, however, the accomplished edible gardener will have had the foresight to sow a green manure like clover or buckwheat, which as well as protecting the soil will fertilise it when dug in next spring.
But if your veg beds are at risk of winter exposure you can judiciously deploy sheets of thick cardboard to cover the soil. It too has the advantage of being (mostly) biodegradable, so it can be composted easily when the worst of the weather passes.
One of the less conventional but surprisingly common methods for protecting garden soil is old fashioned neglect. Enabling weeds such as dandelions to flourish creates a protective canopy, while their roots will help bind the soil and reduce run-off. They will take nutrients from your soil and will need to be removed, roots and all, before the bed is planted but counter-intuitively a patch of ground covered with weeds will fare better against the elements than one left bare.
