Digging. Rotavating. Cultavating. Ploughing

Here on Gardeners Corner, we have a mix of keen gardeners. Some have estate sized gardens others a postage stamp size garden, some just a concrete back yard. So perhaps we can include the plot, the allottment.

So when the seasonal time comes around that calls for the soil to be turned over, manure, compost or artificial fertalizers added. How do we go about it. I have in mind, a recent TV Country File edition, where a farmer gave up plouing the firld and simply re-sowed using the drill method. On a much larger scale. Scientific memos state that in the USA, due to intensive ploughing etc, much of the top soil is actually being blown away by high winds. Please give it a thought. How do you cultivate your garden and why?

 

Lots of farmer tried it and now gone back to ploughing, if you have light sandy soils then it can be done with light workings then drill, but on heavy soil you don't get a good seed bed, but saying that, in a wet planting year and you can't work the soil you can just put the seed on by fert spreader which has been known to give very good results, but that can be just to how the weather can be at the time

 

Topsoil getting blown away is really a problem of soil structure. It happens in the Fens too if the soil dries out. I'm not a farmer, but I believe one thing that's being explored is digging the straw back into the soil to add that structure back. Decomposition takes some nitrogen, but that can be replaced with chemical fertilizers. And if some soil does blow around when it's dug over, you're putting back organic matter which will replace it. I don't know how well-established or well-researched this is though.

I'm not sure this is quite so relevant to garden-scale growing though. Topsoil blowing away can only really happen on large windswept areas with nothing stopping the wind. The average garden has walls or fences round it, your house somewhere and usually other houses nearby, and is full of trees and shrubs, so we don't get that kind of conditions.

What is relevant of course is replacing organic matter in the soil. And on this, gardeners are *way* ahead of farmers, because it's pretty easy to do on the scale of a few square metres of border or veg patch, and most of us don't mind spending the odd tenner down the garden centre for a few bags of compost. It's much harder to do on the scale of acres of farmland, and especially to do it cost-effectively.

Having done most of my gardening around Cambridge too, my personal experience is that most of the soil problems in clay soil come from *too little* digging. Left to its own devices, and especially when walked on, it forms layers of hard pan which basically stops anything growing except the hardiest weeds. Worms literally can't get through it. Once you've broken it up, the worms have a chance, and spreading mulch on top does work. In lighter soils of course this isn't the case - I'm lucky now to be living in a more loamy area where the soil is naturally beautiful. But the point is that what's right for the soil will depend on the soil. Although you mostly can't go wrong with getting organic matter into the soil, especially if it's rotted down a bit so it doesn't suck the nitrogen out.

Of course I'm just an amateur doing this because I enjoy it. It's a good idea for a thread, Mike - looking forward to seeing what the pros can tell us.