F&F improves the garden beds with a lot of good quality compost.
One of the things I moan constantly about is the quality of my garden soil. It really is pretty terrible, and has meant that for the year and a half that we’ve been here, we haven’t had particularly good vegetables, and the herbaceous border last year looked a little weedy too.
I’ve tried my best to improve the soil gradually using homemade compost, chicken manure and horse manure from a local stud. But it was clear that this was going to take a long time, and so I decided this year that I would take drastic measures.
I ordered two massive bulk bags of peat-free vegetable planting compost from a company called Field Compost. They agreed to let me review the compost, which is called Field 15 and is a special mix of sandy loam, multi-purpose compost and soil conditioner that the company says is ‘ideal for re-potting and feeding of vegetable plants, mature foliage and shrubs’. This sounded perfect, not just for my veg beds and containers, but also for the fruit beds and herbaceous borders.
The bags arrived, and my goodness, they were big!
It took a little while to empty them and distribute them around the garden. During those hours of digging the soil out of the bags and wheeling it around my garden, I had a chance to look at the soil. It is a light sandy loamy soil, which makes it very different to my horrible chuggy clay and chalk soil.
I’ve decided that every bed, save those that need manure for squashes and leafy vegetables, will get a really thick mulch of this compost, and all my veg containers will be filled with it too, which means that I’ll have a number of different ways of testing whether this soil really is what it’s cracked up to be.
It has gone on the main herbaceous border, for instance:
And it has gone on the neat lavender bed:
And behind that, you can see the soft fruit bed, which is now very heavily coated with this soil, as is the middle vegetable bed, and all the other beds in the garden. It makes the garden look much neater.
And as the plants grow, I hope it will make the garden healthier and more bountiful. I’ll keep you updated.