THE DARK KNIGHT There’s a hero in your garden, working tirelessly, relatively unseen, often unacknowledged.
ts rewards are few, often infrequent, but it toils on nonetheless, day and night. It’s your soil. Often, I am invited to a garden to advise the owner how best to maintain it and a familiar situation unfolds. The owner will have spent hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds recreating borders, renewing their planting schemes, on many occasions working hand in hand with a garden designer, and the view is impressive. Then my head drops. I peer down to the ground, scratch around a little, and my heart sinks. They’ve dressed their garden up for its new future, but it’s wearing its tattered, worn out shoes from its infancy. There is no spring in its step. It’s tired underneath and it cannot pull off the performance for long. The garden owner has done nothing to care for the soil. Every garden should be built from the ground up, literally. Soil is formed primarily from rock erosion so it contains a certain level of mineral content. This mineral content helps provide
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your plants with nutrition. In addition to rock erosion, soil also contains a health level of decomposed organic matter, as a result of plant and animal decay over time. It is this organic matter that provides its bulk. Dig into your soil and you will see the different layers that constitute it. These are called horizons and consist of (from the bottom up) parent rock, subsoil and topsoil. The roots of most plants will not penetrate deeper than the topsoil level because the majority of nutrients they require are found at this level. It transpires and therefore the deeper your topsoil, the happier the majority of your plants will be. To assess the mood of your plants, look at their appearance. To assess the mood of your soil, give it a feel. Good soil should be dark, crumbly and contain a healthy volume of worms, bacteria, insects and other micro-organisms. It is these little guys that are helping to break down the organic matter which in turn improves your plants’ ability to access the nutrients from this organic matter more quickly.
A good soil containing healthy amounts of organic matter will also contain a good balance of the three main elements that plants require for good growth: 1. Nitrogen supports the green growth in plants through providing protein, which results in increased stem length and leaf size, paramount to helping the plant generate sugars to feed itself. 2. Potassium is required to improve the quality and size of the plant’s flowers and/or fruit. 3. Phosphorous counterbalances the effects nitrogen has on the plant’s metabolic rate, so it keeps it all in balance and it ensures the plant has a good, strong root system.