Tag Archives: soil

Less weeding!

2 February 2019

One of the main changes we’ve this year isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s made a huge difference: we stopped turning the soil over when weeding. It’s only the top hundred centimetres or so that gets disturbed, but that’s enough to damage the soil structure and all the micro-organisms that help get nutrients and moisture to the plants, and the disruption also brings weed seeds to the surface. Those weed seeds germinate once they’re exposed to the light, and the weed cycle starts all over again.

So we’ve been experimenting with a ‘no-dig’ method for looking after the gardens (apart from the wild flower bed by the car park – the poppies and cornflowers grow best in newly-disturbed soil, so we do dig that bed over). We’ve been mulching (covering) the beds with leaf mould or the compost we make in the work area round the back of the gardens, which keeps light from any weeds, and stops them growing. When seeds do blow in from the surrounding gardens and hedges, they do germinate but the weeds are so much easier to remove when the roots are just in the mulch, and not going right down into the soil. We can either just scrape the side of a trowel along the earth to remove seedlings, or slip the point of a trowel under the plant’s growing point (the centre of the plant, where all the stems or leaves come out from at ground level) and lever the top of the plant out – it doesn’t take long to do this for each individual plant, as there are comparatively few in the undisturbed ground.

Looking at the records we keep, I see that in 2017 we spent 48 man-hours weeding; that’s a lot of volunteer time. This year, we spent 17 hours.

We do tend to leave weed seedlings that germinate in autumn, as they help to cover the soil and protect it from heavy rain that drains away nutrients, and from wind that erodes it. It’s a belt and braces approach – the main protection against rain and wind is the compost or leaf mould we put on top of any bare soil, but the plants help, too. And many of those plants are ones we actually want, like Californian poppies, red deadnettles, echiums, cornflowers and so on. If we have plenty of self-sown bee magnets, we can always remove them later if we want to put something else there, and if they’re in the right place, it’s less work and less expense for us!

Another benefit of all the compost and leaf mould mulches is that they get drawn down into the soil by all the worms there now, which increase soil organic matter, and help it to hold more moisture – something that was really useful last summer, when we had five months of exceptional heat and drought. So we’re really grateful to everyone who helped us collect record amounts of leaves this year, which will be usable leaf mould in a year or so. Thank you!

Getting ready for winter

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28 October 2016

We’ve lifted all the spent annual wild flowers in the top bed by the car park, and we’ve resown poppies, cornflowers and toadflax. These cornfield annuals often need a period of cold weather to start their germination, but the bed’s already full of seedlings, probably from last year. We resow every year to be sure we’ll have a good show of flowers from June and July, though we do then have to thin the seedlings to leave enough room for the remaining ones to grow into stronger plants. It works well in practice, but it feels a bit odd to be sowing seeds, then pulling half of them up!

Over the last couple of months we’ve moved a few plants to places where they’ll be happier or look better, we’ve planted bulbs for next spring, sown seeds of California poppies and Welsh poppies, and thinned some of the seedlings of forget-me-nots and borage; all of these provide a lot of nectar and pollen for bees, and by letting seedlings emerge now we’re ensuring they’ll be flowering earlier next year than if we’d sown them in the spring. It does mean that we can’t mulch all the beds, though, or we’ll choke seeds that are still emerging. We’d like to mulch the beds to prevent heavy rain from damaging the soil structure, to keep nutrients in the soil, and to provide places where beneficial insects can hibernate. Blackbirds seem to appreciate a layer of leaf mould, too, judging by the amount they turn onto the paths when they’re looking for worms underneath it.

We try to have the gardens looking their best for Remembrance Sunday, which isn’t quite as easy as it is in June and July! We do leave quite a few stems and seed heads for hibernating insects, because many seed heads look good in frost, and because it stops the gardens looking too bare through the winter months; however, we try to balance these ecological requirements with keeping the gardens looking cared for and well tended, in respect of their setting. It’s a difficult balance.

Although we’ve started making our own leaf mould, it won’t be ready for another couple of years and we used all our existing stock to make peat-free potting compost; so we’re very grateful to the local residents who’ve given us enough leaf mould for our needs this year. Thank you!

Looking ahead to next year

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20 August 2016

It’s about a year since we started refocusing here in the gardens, using more garden flowers to allow us to provide nectar and pollen for bees over a longer period than we could with only wild flowers, while respecting the setting of a semi-formal memorial garden. We thought it would take a couple of full seasons for the new plan to mature, so it seems a good time to look at how the gardens are doing.

When the current team started work on the beds about a year ago, we inherited some shrubs planted along the centre of the bed nearest the war memorial and down the centre of some of the other beds, and a couple of roses planted right next to the paths between the beds. We moved the roses out of the way of the paths, and we’ve gradually added lavender plants along the edges of most of the beds, to make an informal hedge and to provide structure through the winter when most of the annuals and herbaceous perennials die back. All the plants we’ve put in are establishing well and developing into a good framework for the more informal planting inside the beds.

This year the bulbs, pulmonaria and perennial wallflower provided plenty of nectar in early spring for bees as they emerged from hibernation and started nesting, while the other perennials and annuals gradually took over from them, including peas and runner beans planted by the children from the local preschool. We had a great display of poppies, cornflowers and oxeye daises in the top bed (nearest the car park). We try to have at least two of the bees’ favourite plants in flower at any time between February to November, and so far we’ve managed that. Right now the bees’ favourite flowers are the blue hyssops in the second bed down from the car park, and the yellow daisy-like coreopsis at the other end of the bed:

Now we’re getting ready for the start of the gardening year in the autumn. We won’t be cutting and clearing until the spring, so that we don’t leave too many places where bare earth will be exposed to heavy rain, which damages soil structure and leaches nutrients away. We leave stems when they don’t look too messy, to provide shelter for overwintering insects, and we also add leaf mould to protect the soil from winter weather and to start getting more organic matter into it – that’s ‘organic’ meaning a necessary component of all soil, rather than meaning a particular way of gardening.

We’re also adding a few more plants and moving others around to places where they’ll grow best, and we’ll also sow seeds of annuals like the bright orange Californian poppies that looked so good earlier in the year. And our other main job is to clear the wild flower bed (nearest the car park) and re-sow poppies and cornflowers for next year; they grow best on ground that’s been cultivated, so we need to turn it over every year.