You’d have to be blind not to notice that people are growing food. As yet they’re not quite turning their lap pools into sunken vege beds, but it may well happen. Certainly urban courtyards, of which the centrepiece was once the stylish outdoor gas fire, are now being overtaken by unstylish pots and barrels full of lettuces, potatoes and even, spookily, silver beet.
On any garden safari you might take these days, you’ll find the vegetables are rivalling decorative plants for space. Food is being grown in raised beds, flower gardens, barrels, pots, buckets, tractor tyres and wheelbarrows, and the produce seems not remotely affected by its container.
What is the world coming to? Well, hopefully it’s coming to the realisation that growing your own food is healthy, economical and, if you’re good at it, sustainable. Some gardeners seem to be able to grow food season after
season without the slightest difficulty.
No doubt they have many secrets, but one of them has to be the soil. Few of us are lucky enough to have perfect soil. Even if it is, it’s only going to be perfect for one group of plants because, as with clothing, “one size fits all” just doesn’t work.
If you want to enrol at university or polytech and study soil science and other dirty things, you might learn everything you need to know about how to create perfect soil. If you haven’t time for that, there are a few straightforward rules of thumb that will get you started.
Soil with a high clay content can be much improved if you add compost to the top 20cm or so of your beds every time you plant. Either homemade or commercial compost from the garden centre will do the trick. Sheep pellets and animal manures are good too, but mix them into the soil unless you want to dig through a crust of dried horse poo to put your lettuces in.
If you’re really serious, and you have space, you can grow ryegrass, oats, mustard or barley, then cut them and dig them into the soil in early spring. Then you need to mulch, topping up in the summer.
If your problem’s not clay but light soil, again add lots of organic matter. Mix it in and use it as a mulch as well. If you can, mix silt and clay with bought topsoil and add that, again forking in some animal manure. Use slow-release fertilisers, or try soluble fertilisers little and often.
Bear in mind that the experts say overuse of soluble fertilisers may negatively affect biological activity. Does this sound like hard work? Think again. Half a day spent improving your soil every couple of weeks is a small price to pay for fat, sweet tomatoes, stunning strawberries, fresh greens, colourful capsicums and a food bill that gets smaller every week.
Making your own compost
I’ve made compost. Well, to be accurate, we’ve made compost – and that means everyone who lives in the house and contributes scraps to the compost container that lives on the bench, the people who pick up dead leaves and broken branches and shove them in the outdoor compost bin, and the one person who, when he thinks about it, turns the whole mess over with a fork.
For many, many months the compost bin seemed to contain nothing but egg shells, squeezed lemons and leftover salad greens, and I despaired of it ever becoming anything remotely useful.
But one day, despite our apathy, it turned into soil. Certainly there were still egg shells and lemons on top, but underneath was lovely, dark, crumbly soil absolutely riddled with worms. A miracle. Actually it’s not a miracle. Just what’s known as a “cool” compost bin, which means one where you chuck all the stuff in as it comes to hand and then ignore it.
A year or so later and vMila – yummy soil with worms. If that’s a bit too long to wait, you need a hot heap, which will produce soil in as little as three months. For this method, you need to put all the essential ingredients in there at once,
and turn it over as often as you can manage.
You don’t need to know all that much to produce compost – basically just what to put in, what to put it in and how to maintain the right levels of brown stuff, green stuff, sun and water.
There’s plenty of information on it in books, magazines, on the internet and in the brains of most people over the age of 50 who have a great garden. Just ask them. There’s nothing old composters like more than talking dirty.
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