Soil improvement

Our soil here is clay, about 12 inches of very much clay soil over 5 feet of pure clay. Also the area is badly drained which doesn't improve things! We put one line of drainage throught he worst bit which had made a lot of difference but some areas are still under water in the winter. There are clumps of iron in the soil, there were lots of worms of the bad kind, none of the good kind and it was either pure mud or like concrete.

I dug over most of the soil at the start and added in a few bags of soil conditioner from B&Q which has been quite good. I'm not giving them an advert but they are 5 minutes away so got a few visutes a week from me throught the first year. It would be cheaper to buy in bulk but I didn't have the money in bulk! Anyway it improved the soil a lot.

In the spring I had some birthday money to spend (on the garden,yeah!!) which went on some nice pots and a litre bottle of E.M. - Effective Microbes. If you haven't tried these before or heard of them, read up now and buy a bottle! What make healthy soil? A good soil structure, earthworms, and a thriving population of microbes! A womans best friend?

The formula for E.M. was devised over 20 years by a Japanese scientist Dr. Teruo Higa in a bid to reduce our reliance on artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The aim is instead to promote life and help ailing ecosystems.

When the bottle arrived I mixed some up (it goes far, you use it at 1% concentration in water) and watered a few tomato plants with it. In the morning I went into the greenhouse to check and it was like a cartoon, my eyes nearly popped out of my head at the difference!! It was like the plants had been in the gym over night, hard to explain but imagine an Olympic athlete full of energy and life compared to most of us on a Monday morning, going through the motions.
(Really shouldn't have used that phrase, I have dealt with other peoples motions, bowel ones, on a Monday morning and it ain't good).

Which takes us neatly onto the subject of poo!! What else does a girl need but poo? I purchased some goats poo through my local L.E.T.S. group, West Lothian which may have improved my soil and the herbs are meant to love it BUT my car still stinks on a warm day, two years later.
No, I like my poo closer to home so I got a couple of rabbits instead and a worm bin.

I like rabbits anyway and I must like worms 'cos I used to eat them (Iwas a baby, give me a break). The rabbits eat the bits and pieces from the garden like dandelion leaves and grass that I won't eat, then their poo feeds the worms. This year I got a 3 buckets of great looking compost from the worm bin plus lots of worms in the compost heaps and there is always plenty of rabbit poop and bedding for the heaps as well. Works great all round. Also it feels good having a kind of loop in the garden of ........ Plants - us/rabbits - worms/compost heap - soil - Plants.

One good thing about rabbit poo is that it can go straight on to the soil as it is well digested (twice) by the rabbits and so doesn't do any harm. I used it last winter as a mulch for a lot of plants to keep the worst of the winter of them.

I have also dug in left over compost from the tomatoes and molehills that I collected from the football pitch. And don't tell anyone, but after the donkey rides at last years Gala day there were some "presents" left lying so I took them home for the garden too. I got spotted doing it as well, and even I thought it was taking things a bit too far.

The soil now is much, much better and the plants are healthy. I keep watering the E.M. into the soil and spraying it about, I am sure last year it stopped the tomatoes getting blight. They showed all the signs of it, I sprayed like mad and the plants went healthy again. Also, I have to say it, when it has been watered in and sprayed around the garden is like the best ever sparkly fairy kingdom!!!! I am not quite sure what happens but something does. I put some E.M. in my muesli but it didn't turn me into a fairy. I maybe went a bit nutty though.

for E.M. and worms try http://www.bubblehouseworms.com/