Allotments 4 All

Everyone says that organic matter is best for improving your soil / clay soil, but what does this mean exactly?

I have a half compost bin full of organic matter but it is far from ready yet. Should I be putting anything into the soil without composting, like old soil from houseplants, tea leaves / coffee grounds or something else?

I love this forum because you learn so much. Please forgive me for asking such a simple question.

Have a look in here http://tinyurl.com/36j587 and http://tinyurl.com/2kffxs this might help!

This one always amuses me. Most gardening books say to get your soil right, add organic matter,then they give details on composting which takes for ages. If you are stuck with bad soil you have to use till it gets better.

Adding compost is another one I find amusing, great add compost, but with a double lottie,  while waiting for your own to be ready, how many bags of commercial compost do you need to make a decent  difference....pass.

Mulching..add grass clippings, I have no lawn,add straw, have been trying for 4 days  to find some with no luck, everywhere I have tried they have the big roll things.

Use plenty of manure, super stuff I had 2 truckloads delivered a week ago but it can't be used until mature, a year  minimum.

This must be very confusing for the new gardener.

So you get a plot, you dig it, you find it is clay, what do you actually do next, I have never been able to come up with a good reply.

Eventually your plot will get better but what in the meantime?

XX Jeannine

PS this is not meant to be sarcastic, it is what I wanted to ask years ago.

I am into my third year on my lotty and i thought my clay soil would be a nightmare but i managed to grow potatoes in it fine without doing too much in the first year and since then it seemed easier as the potatoes seemed to break up the clay.  I added lime in winter as it is meant to break up the clay.  this year i have started to mulch too  with straw and shredded paper (as advised by supersprout) but i find my soil seems to be improving each year just because it is being used.

Claire :D

Dig in any plant material you can lay hands on, scrounge stuff from neighbours, get coffee grounds from Starbucks, etc etc. It will break down in the soil anyway. I have an old nappy bin outside the back door and everything goes into that, tea bags, peelings, everything from the kitchen and it all goes on the compost heap
The other thing you can do is sow green manures, normally this is done in autumn and dug in before it flowers in spring, and there is a section in the wiki here about them.  I use poached egg plant, as it's easy to dig in although it doesn't have as much goodness in it as some others it still improves the soil. Two plants that you can use now as a green manure in a similar way is lettuce and turnips - both germinate and grow very quickly, and they are cheap to buy.

I dug in masses of dead leaves as I dug my plot for the first time. After a year, it was still there, apparently unchanged. I soon swopped to mulching. But it's just a matter of time; it was a lot better after the first 12 months.

My beds are 30ft long and roughly 5ft wide, and each year I dig in 3 heaped builders barrowfuls of farm yard manure per bed.

Thats the best I can do to quantifying the process!

I hope it helps you

Collecting stuff for compost can be addictive - I collect my own at home, but also have a bin in the office for everyone to put thier fruit, teabags etc in at work!  They think I'm wierd but I'll be the one with loads of compost !!!

If you dig it into a trech the worms will do the composting for you

Has anyone tried out the method they use in Africa?

dig trench fill with any material you would put in your compost bin and then cover plant into it (similar to a bean trench)
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