One foot in the compost heap
By: Steve Ott
I must have one of the few jobs in the country where it is possible to get away with talking manure (and when I put my foot in it, it is often quite literally). In this issue, however, we discuss the pongy stuff rather more freely than usual – more precisely, whether we need to use it on our plots at all.
Steve Ott, Editor
This discussion is more important than you might think with continuing fears of weedkiller contamination and burgeoning weed seeds regularly accompanying some unlucky plotters’ loads.
Apologies if you are reading this over lunch but my soil can’t get enough of the stuff. My problem is that my garden is so long, narrow and uphill for lots of the way, that while the soil may be crying out for manure, you’d have to bury me under it by the time I’d moved even half of a steaming great trailer-load.
So instead I take an easier and less pungent approach and use as much of my own garden compost as I can. It only has to be barrowed a few feet and my crops seem to grow well enough, but still I wonder if they would be better with a few tonnes of cow or horse muck generously applied. However, having read the comments from Bob Sherman and Edwin Oxlade, plus a whole bunch of KG forum members (see pages 88/89), my mind has been put at rest. Most agree that if it’s got lots of organic matter in it, it really doesn’t matter where it comes from – it’s all food for the soil.
There are some other little threads running through sections of the magazine this month too, and that is recycling and DIY. On page 50 Joyce Russell shows you how to make a couple of clever cloches to keep your early sowings frost free, while on page 76 Emma Rawlings answers that much asked question in the KG office ‘can I recycle my old potting compost’. On page 80 we join Penny Bunting, herself a keen plotter, as she travels to the Peaks to meet a gardening couple for whom green issues are firmly on the agenda.
If it’s good old fashioned growing advice you are after however, we have bags of it in this issue. Andrew Tokely explains how to get the best from carrots (timely advice for those anxious to sow the FREE packet of carrot seeds to be found on the front of KG this month), while Joe Maiden has lots of advice for those of us who love spinach but who often find it more difficult to grow than we are prepared to admit.
Fruit lovers should turn to page 70 where pear enthusiast Adrian Baggaley offers his list of the best varieties for you to try (you’ll find some money-saving offers on pears on page 78 too). And that’s just the tip of the heap!
Happy plotting,
Steve
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