Infinite Ideas - Grow your own food: simple ideas for home-grown produce

Grow your own food

Simple ideas for home-grown produce

Infinite Ideas with
Anna Marsden, Jem Cook, Mark Hillsdon, Lynn Huggins-Cooper and Natalia Marshall

8. Soil

If you are moving house and want to grow your own food, check out the soil before you purchase the property both the depth and type. Without good, hearty soil, your vegetables and fruit will never thrive.

Save yourself heartache later on. Grill the vendor about the land, and take good notice of what is growing already (even if it is just weeds). Ask permission to take samples. Dont be afraid to be cheeky.

Turning over a hand trowel of soil (or, better still, a spadeful) will show how deep the soil is. If the soil depth is very shallow, you may have problems, so it is worth checking. But beyond the depth of the topsoil, how do you check what type of soil you are dealing with? Quite simply, test it. You need to know about your topsoil before you can think about what you can grow.

There are five main types of soil: sandy, clay, loam, chalky and peat. Sandy soil is light and easy to dig. If you pick up a handful, it will feel loose and a little gritty. In windy areas, this type of soil can even blow away! Water runs through sandy soil quickly, and nutrients can be leached out of the soil as the water drains away. All is not lost, however a sandy soil can be improved by the addition of lots of organic matter such as compost, and well-rotted manure to make it more water retentive and bulky.

A clay soil is heavy, and can be hard to dig. When you try to dig a clay soil, it sticks to your spade, and your feet. A handful of clay soil will stick together if you add water. It will roll into a ball between your thumb and fingers. In dry spells, clay cracks and can become iron hard and inhospitable to plants; in wet spells, puddles may lay on the ground for days, drowning growth. Clay soil has very small particles, and the best way to improve this type of soil is to dig in plenty of organic material such as leaf mould and well-rotted compost, together with manure.

You can also help matters by digging in the autumn, leaving the large clods exposed to the cold weather and frost. This will help to break them down into a fine tilth. We have managed to create a rich, very productive soil here on clay using these methods. Be careful, though, not to tread on clay-based beds if you can avoid it. If the soil is compressed, the aeration is lost.

Loamy soil is dark and crumbly, and full of organic material. When you rub a handful between your fingers, it will feel smooth. Loam is great for growing most plants.

Chalky soil is pale, even to the point of looking grey. Again, water drains away quickly and you will need to dig in plenty of water retaining organic matter in the form of manure, compost and leaf would.

Peat-based soil is confined to a few areas, but it is very fertile and water retentive, as the soil is made up from decomposed plants. However, it can be very acidic.

Alkaline, neutral or acid?

The pH level of the soil can affect what will grow there. Most vegetables prefer a slightly acidic soil, with a pH of between 6 and 5 (neutral being 7). Potatoes, marrows and tomatoes like their soil slightly more acidic, at around 5 to 5.5. Brassicas prefer a slightly alkaline soil, with a pH of 7 to 8.

So, its time to get out the test tubes and indulge your mad scientist fantasies! You can buy simple pH testing kits from garden centres (both online and real). You take soil samples from different parts of your garden or land and add different solutions to determine the pH balance of your soil. You match the solution colour to a supplied chart and the colour shows you the pH level of your soil samples.

If your soil is overly acidic, you can dig in lime to correct this. Dig it in after you dig over ground to leave it to overwinter. The rain washes it through the soil, ready for spring planting. This only needs to be done every two or three years. If it is too acidic or alkaline, most plants cannot easily absorb the minerals and nutrients in the soil and they will be stunted.

Heres an idea for you

Place a small amount of soil, about 5cm, in a jar. Add water to fill the jar and shake it. Leave it to settle overnight. Any gravel and coarse particles such as grit and sand will settle on the bottom. Lighter, smaller particles will form a layer on top of this and any organic matter will float on the surface. If the gravel and sand layers are the biggest, you have sandy soil. The gritty layer above this shows you how much loam is present. If the clay layer the tiny particles is the thickest layer, you have a clay soil.

How did it grow?

Q Some areas of my land are acidic, but others arent. How can this be the case?

A If a field is overgrazed, it can easily become acidic. The animals crop the grass down to the roots and drops heaps of dung, which soon makes the soil acidic. The grass plants cannot break down the high acidity because they are being overgrazed.

Q I have been offered a large quantity of cheap mushroom compost. Could this improve my soil?

A Spent mushroom compost is a real boon. It improves the physical structure of the soil and increases the activity of useful micro-organisms and earthworms. It is also pleasant to work with, with an earthy smell and a crumbly texture.

9. Crop rotation

Crop rotation reduces the chance that diseases will build up in one place, giving you sickly or diseased plants, and it stops the soil from becoming impoverished. You achieve this by not growing the same type of crop in the same place every year.

Permanent crops (such as fruit bushes, fruit trees, many herbs, rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries, artichokes etc.) do not need to be rotated and can be planted anywhere in the garden that pleases you. You do not need to move them.

Annual crops that you harvest, and then they are finished (such as carrots and other root vegetables, potatoes, peas, beans, leeks, onions, beetroot, cabbage and greens) are different. You should establish four beds to give you a rotation. This sounds like a fuss, but its worth it. If you grew cabbages, sprouts and cauliflower (members of the Brassica family) in the same bed every year, you would run the risk of the ground becoming infected with club root a disfiguring disease that makes cabbages sickly, with, quite literally, roots like a club that cannot take in nutrients properly. If you move the bed that you use each year, you reduce the risk.

Likewise, carrots and parsnips should be moved year by year because they are susceptible to root fly. Leaving them in the same bed makes it more likely that the pests will build up to epidemic levels the next year. In the same way, onions should be moved to reduce the risk of onion fly. Rotation has been used for centuries to combat these problems.

Another important reason for crop rotation is to stop the soil from becoming impoverished by losing nutrients particularly used by a given crop. Rotation makes use of goodness in the soil left over from previous crops.

When planning your beds, it makes sense to group plants from the same family together; it also makes sense to group plants together that enjoy the same growing conditions. By grouping together plants that have the same nutritional needs, you will be able to feed the soil specifically to suit each group. Peas and beans like lime and are greedy feeders, so lime may be added to the bed. Brassicas like fairly alkaline soil, so it would make sense for them to follow the peas and beans into a bed on the next rotation.

How to organise crop rotation year 1

The most commonly used system is known as the three-bed system. The confusing thing is, it uses four beds. Basically, you divide your plot into four beds. The first bed is for your root vegetables, such as carrots, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, beetroot, etc. For best results add a leaf mould and plenty of comfrey tea to this bed before planting. Make sure, if its a new plot, that there are not too many stones in the soil. (But dont think you will ever remove them all they breed! Just remind yourself they are good for drainage.) Too many stones, and your root veggies will fork as they hit the stone, and grow into strange shapes.