Down to earth... with Anne Morris (From Salisbury Journal)

Down to earth... with Anne Morris

3:12pm Thursday 22nd January 2009 in Going Green

ARCTIC conditions earlier this month may have done a good deed.

The prolonged frost certainly penetrated at least several inches down, so much so that the parsnips had to stay put, but hopefully, the frost went far enough to kill a lot of slugs.

Previous mild winters and wet summers ensured that the slug population at Spire View had reached epic proportions and the daily task of drowning the slimy pests in salted water last summer became a ritual.

Of course, there are many living organisms that are essential for good soil maintenance, such as earthworms, microscopic fungi and bacteria and the saying ‘if you look after your soil, it will look after your plants’ is pertinent.

In order to look after your soil properly, you need to know what your soil type is – clay, sandy, silt or loam – and this is easily achieved by picking up a small handful, and letting it run through your fingers.

Clay will feel sticky and stay on your hands. You can also mould it easily into a ball, silt has a silkier feel and also moulds easily, while sandy soil feels gritty and slips through your fingers. Loam is considered to be the gardener’s dream soil containing roughly equal amounts of sand, silt and clay.

A sandy soil is easy to work because it is free draining, which also means though that nutrients are easily washed away by rain, whereas a clay soil is much tougher to dig and can easily become waterlogged in the winter and cracked and caked in the summer.

There is one simple and free way of correcting soil deficiencies – mulching with your own homemade compost.

Lay compost on top of the soil as thick mulch enables the micro-organisms to do the rest of the work, naturally, improving fertility, drainage and water retention respectively.