What is soil?

Soil holds plants in place. It holds nutrition to feed the plant roots. In turn the plants also hold the soil in place, making a happy balance.

Soil consists of a mixture of ingredients, which include: sand, silt, grit and bulky materials made up of rotted leaves, plants and animals. Good soil is a living balanced mixture of all of these ingredients. Look out for worms in the soil; this will indicate that the soil is healthy.

Good soil is all important in a garden, especially if you want to grow healthy plants and vegetables. When you look at an established border, all you see is topsoil.

Topsoil is the part of the ground that holds the most nutrition for the plants. Dig down 30cm to 60cm (1ft to 2ft) in an established garden and things change. You’ll see a clear boundary between the topsoil and subsoil.

Subsoil is denser, clay like substance that plants won’t grow in. In some new gardens, especially on estates built on heavy soils, that clay subsoil (from foundations) etc, has been spread over the natural topsoil and then covered with a few inches of indifferent topsoil.

This can cause the soil to be too wet and lacking nutrition for the plants and grass. Whether the soil in your garden is new or old it will benefit from the addition of compost, both for food for the plants and to help drain water.

Bulky organic matter from the compost bin could be dug or worked lightly into the soil. You could also get well-rotted manure from the horse stables or mushroom farm. Some traditional gardeners like to dig the compost well into the ground with something called the double digging method. This requires a big fork and a lot of backbreaking work. I like to take the more relaxed method of putting the material onto the surface of the soil, forking in lightly and letting the worms do the hard work of pulling the goodness into the ground. This is what is called mulching. You decide which seems the best for yourself. All of these materials will help loosen the soil to make planting easier.

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