Hit the Dirt; The Answer's in the Soil

Hi this is Claire Ackroyd you know listening to hit the dirt. Since these few minutes a title hit the dirt I thought it was about time that we discussed the dirt or soil as we prefer to call it in England. On the BBC radio in England there is an old long running soap opera called the arches which is being going 15 minutes a day for the last four decades or more and it chronicles the family's very boring family's life as it passes through the decades and one of the old standing jokes about the arches is that Fred Archer who's one of the family patriarchs responds to every one of life's little crises by saying Well I think the answer lies in the soil. So the message for today is to heed Fred. He's not that wrong. I would have a hard time quantifying exactly the percentage but you can be sure of that. Most of the problems and failures and successes in gardening can be traced back to the condition of the soil and getting the soil right is the most important thing you can do in becoming a good gardener. It's basically the origin of all organic and intensive gardening techniques and anyone claiming to have a green thumb should probably look again.

It's more likely to be brown covered with manure and well rotted vegetable waste. The need to work on your soil is especially acute in Maine since there is very little naturally fertile soil in the state especially in the central part of the state. The usual choice that gardeners are faced with being dry bony gravel or hard heavy clays. Problem becomes especially difficult when you're working with disturbed sites where any natural structure or fertility has been destroyed by bulldozers. At this point I become somewhat caught on the horns of a sort of philosophical dilemma because part of me wants to insist that you adapt your planting plans to fit the existing soil conditions and the rest of me wants to exhort you to adapt the soil and make it suitable to support any plants you want to grow. But it's not really the conflict that this seems because all the whole planting plans and landscaping designs ought to be sympathetic to the site that you're working with. Unless you're attempting a completely completely naturalized garden on an undisturbed site your soil will always need improvement if you want to grow healthy vegetables fruit

flowers or shrubs. I'm not really an advocate of importing truckloads of loam or loom. To make up for the lack of any good soil. It's a scarce resource in this state and if you truck loan away from one site you're merely depleting another one that somebody may want to grow something in some other day. And it seems to me to be preferable to try to improve and work with what you've got. Although importing some soil at some point for strategic planting projects may be unavoidable. The short answer on how to improve your soil is two small words organic matter. Plan to handle wastes when rotted down to a sticky brown substance known as humorous. Have the magical ability to improve both light and heavy soils. And humorists rotted organic product enables a dry poor soil to retain moisture and nutrients and it lightens and I rate the heavy badly drained clay soil it needs to be worked into the soil to the depth of the entire root

system of the plant to intend to grow preferably over the whole but all planting area and not just into individual planting holes. So if you're planting perennial making perennial plantings you really can only get one shot at getting the soil right before you plant because although you can dress and fertilize established plants you can't go back in under them again and improve an adequate soil once you've planted it. If you can work a whole good load of rotten compost into the air you intend to plant. You will be repaid for years to come with healthy plants and for less permanent and flower flower and vegetable gardens. Adding new organic matter becomes an annual part of maintaining your soil fertility. The source of your organic matter is really less important than the quantity of it. We are lucky in Maine to have sources of copious organic waste their old bark piles up behind most mills. There's endless quantities of leaves lawn clippings and stable many others and now with the advent of new technologies and techniques that are

wood chips and municipal sewage compost piles which are available. These are all good but the most obvious source of good soil improving organic matter is your own compost heap. Everybody should have one. And unless you live under a canopy of huge trees and are in danger of being buried by the annual leaf drop you should never let organic matter leave your property. Leaves and lawn clippings weeds kitchen vegetable waste and little manure for extra effect when all piled up together together and left to rot. Make a perfect soil amendment. There's really none better. There's no need to take this whole process too seriously. There are whole books on composting techniques which involve complicated instructions on layering compost turning it adding bacterial starters and so on but basically the lazy gardener can stack up the rubbish and let it take and let nature take its course. I was left alone for long enough it will all rot down the same in the end. And you really need three piles. You need one that you are currently adding to and one

sitting and rotting and the third one which is already in brown and rotten and you're dipping into it whenever you're puttering around the garden. There are a few common sense tips about making a compost heap you want to leave the most noxious weeds out of it so that you don't risk constantly recycling one of your gardens worse problems. You should avoid putting huge piles of undiluted. High carbon material slow to rot things like wood chips and straw should be used moderately and if you're using a lot of long clippings it's useful to intersperse them with something like straw leaves to bring a little air into the compost heap because otherwise you get a slimy smelly mess of anaerobic leaf waste. Lawn waste which can take a very long time to turn into compost. But if you follow a few of these basic tips you will have a wonderful product. I have deliberately ignored the most populous Isle of Man which is peat moss because I have an increasingly guilty conscience about ripping up peat bogs which are

ancient and very valuable information and it seems a shame to be ripping them up merely to improve sales when other alternatives are available. Anyway the bottom line is that Brown is good if you keep composting and I mean organic material so you can watch your garden and your thumb become evergreen. This is Claire Ackroyd new thing listening to. Her.