If you want to be able to sit back on your Charles Taylor garden furniture and enjoy a garden full of sumptuous blooms, you need fertile soil.
The standard solution to that is to use chemical fertilisers, but these destroy micro-life such as bacteria and earthworms that healthy soil requires.
Here are some fertilisation alternatives.
Use organic matter
Any plants that you have in your garden will use up soil nutrients to grow, while the micro-life will break up the structure of the soil. This leads to soil that is poorer in quality and not very porous – but you can re-fertilise it using organic matter. Examples of this can include peat-free compost, compost made at home or well-rotted manure from a farm.
Use natural compounds
These will be particularly effective if you have garden soil that is heavy and clay-like in consistency. Examples of natural compound fertilisers are blood, fish and bone, chicken pellet fertiliser and liquid seaweed. Most of these should just be added to your compost to help keep the soil rich in the nutrients needed for plants to grow.
Relieve compaction
If you walk across your soil, this will lead to it becoming compacted. When this happens, any pockets of air cave in, ensuring that roots cannot penetrate, and earthworms cannot survive.
Use a garden fork to relieve compaction by creating holes and breaking apart hard compacted areas. Build paths between the beds to stop it from happening in the future too.
This blog goes to show that you don’t need chemicals to keep your soil healthy!
