Organic Vegetable Gardens - How To Create Them Despite Bad Soil

Try these seven proven organic gardening ideas to improve poor soil, with no cost, and with minimal effort. How do you improve a garden that's totally dead? Imagine builder's rubble covered with sand. Or perhaps fir trees have been there for generations and utterly depleted the ground. Nothing will grow there but cola cans.

What's the natural gardening solution?

Get hold of several tons of well rotted manure. Horse manure is best but any litter from a fowl or herbivore will do, in this extreme case. Farmers are often happy to give it away. They may even truck it to you.

Blend it with sand and old leaves, if you can find them. It's not usually a good idea to put leaves straight into the ground but they'll decay fast enough if mixed with manure. You simply need plenty of harmless, degradable muck that will bring life and air to the soil.

Till that manure into the ground or, to be lazy, spread it thinly on the top and hope the worms drag it down.

Get a lot of raw kitchen waste from a restaurant or hotel. Ideal are vegetable peelings rather than plate scrapings, which will include meat and fish scraps. These will attract rats and crows.

But provided they're buried under the soil, even meat scraps will do no harm. At this stage, the aim is not to grow food but to build a rough compost heap.

Work that waste into the soil and scatter as many worms on top as you can get. At worst, you can buy them from an angling shop. Red brandling worms are the best and you can often find them under rotted leaves or lawn clippings.

Sow a green manure, like clover, alfalfa or even broad beans. In bad soil, beans won't grow well but you don't plan to eat them. They develop nitrogenous nodules on their roots which will nourish the soil. When the plants are grown, rake them into the soil, leaves and all.

Make an impromptu compost trench. Just dig a furrow and throw in all the degradable garbage from your kitchen. Throw soil on the top as you go, to suppress the stench and keep birds off. Once that trench is full, dig another one alongside it.

When your garden is replete with furrows, the trash in the first trench will have sunk down into a rough compost. Now it's ready to grow something sturdy in, like squash, sweet corn or potatoes.

As soon as that rough soil is half-way ready to grow in, sow collards or spinach in it. These will flourish any place. They make an edible green manure. You can cook the leaves or just plough them into the soil to enrich its texture.

Another tip to improve the soil fast is to sow a lot of peas in rows. Any short variety will serve. They'll lean against each other as they grow, so you don't have to support them. Of course, you won't get much food but their roots will nourish the soil.

This is a great idea early in the season because, once the peas are grown and out, you can sow bush beans in their place that should be ready by high summer.

Now you have more green manure to till in - and you can eat the beans as well!

Once the beans have been harvested, and the plants dug into the soil, you may have the opportunity to sink in a fall crop of garlic, cabbages, kale and other plants that will keep going over winter.

By next spring, that bad soil should have improved sufficiently so you can think about growing more delicate crops.

The main principle is to get as much degradable matter into that soil as you can. You don't need to buy it. In the country, you can usually find animal waste. In the city, kitchen waste can be collected from restaurants. Why not bring them an empty sack and uplift it each week, filled.

You don't need to bury this trash deep. Eventually, it will decay and the worms will pull it down.

Keep working in that nutritious garbage and you should have a fine vegetable garden within two years. Although it began with builder's rubble!


------

Dr John Yeoman PhD is chairman of the information network for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild. Discover hundreds of ingenious plans to grow more food in your garden with less cost and work in his practical manual Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. Claim it for free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy