Can I speed up the "maturing" process Moved to G/Gardening/Wiseoldowl

I'm not comletely new to gardening but I'm far from and expert.

My problem is we moved into this new house 15 yeas ago and the garden was, not unsurprisingly, largely infertile sub-soil rather than proper topsoil. However after 15 years of diging in compost, manure and gererally diging it over and over I would have expected thigs to have improved. Actually things seem to be getting worse as the fertility of the soil seems to be getting poorer and poorer with every passing year.

I can get some potatoes but they are generally quite samll. Every thing else comes to almost nothing cabages, califlowers have no or very tiny hearts. Some things like carrots just refuse to grow at all.

Any advice you can give would be most welcome.

 

Hi and welcome to Gardeners Corner!

Can you go out and take a heap of photo's of your garden? There may be some other reason that a member here spots from the photo's.

How do your neighbours gardens fare? And how do things in pots/containers/baskets do in your garden?

Steve...

 

Thanks for your reply. I can try and post some photos.

I have not really tried pots/containers, the hanging basket at the front door usually does OK.

The guy next door seems to do quite well but he invests a huge amount of time on it. He had a load of landscaping done on it just after we moved in and I suspect he had a lorry load of topsoil delivered as part of it.


David.

 

I would have expected that too.

What was it before the houses were built? Ploughed field? If so there may be a plough-pan, and if that is not broken up nothing will grow.

Plough-pan is where the wheel of the tractor have run in the furrow when ploughing [over the course of many years] and that, coupled with always ploughing to same depth, creates a rock solid layer until the top "spit" of soil. Farmers normally sub-soil or similar to break that up - pulling a few long "spikes" through the soil that go down deeper than the plough depth, but not disturbing/turning the actual layers of soil. But that may not have been done for a while before the land was converted to houses / gardens.

We had this at a previous house. We had to use a pickaxe to break through the sub-soil when planting anything.

Probably easy to tell: dig a hole, put the top spit to one side, then try digging the second spit out. You might have to go deeper because the builders may have re-contoured the land.

If you have a whole load of building rubble buried under the plot that could also be the cause.

If you have those sorts of problems I would suggest hiring the biggest digger you can get into your garden (which might be a tiny mechanical digger if access is tight), dig a trench of reasonable width (i.e. what you can easily reach with the digger) carefully separating off the top spit and putting that to one side, then excavate the second spit removing all bricks/rubble etc and put that back in place, then put the top spit back on top again. A bit like double-digging by hand with a space. You can do it by hand if the plot is small, or you are energetic!

If there is nothing wrong with the sub-soil then the only other thing I can think of is poor drainage (in which case put in a French drain / perforated drainage pipe), or there is something noxious in your soil (which your neighbour might have avoided by replacing their soil with fresh top soil), or something is leaching into your soil

I certainly would have expected the humus you have added to have made a significant difference by now (assuming you were generous with how much you applies :thumb

 

The land was fields before the houses were build. It might have been used for dairy cattle or to grow barley, I don't know. The "soil is heavy clay, and no matter what gets dug into it it just seems to return to the same heavy clay over winter. Beneath about 18 inches to 2 foot down I guess you would need a pick axe to break it up as a spade just bounces off it. So it might be from ploughing and I suppose that could cause drainage problems.

 

If you have have to use a pickaxe at the 18" depth point to break up clay (rather than stone / rock / etc) then you definitely have a plough-pan problem (even if not caused by a plough)

Double digging (or mechanical equivalent) to break that up is the only way I know, unless you can get some sort of equipemtn in to drag a chisel through it, but I reckon that would not be possible in a small garden.

Raised beds might solve the problem, as an alternative, if you just want to grow veg. but I doubt that drains (alone) will do. A plough-pan is like concrete as far as plant roots are concerned, so for any trees / shrubs / etc I think that will be pretty much a non-starter, sadly :(

 

I have never heard of a veg plant that penetrates down to 18ins.

I've done ok over the years with about 12 ins of top soil on solid clay and sand stone.

I'm guessing you just dont have enough humus in the top soil.

You say your neighbours are doing OK after importing top soil?

That could be the problem, the place was stripped of top soil when the houses were built and you are now struggling to improve total clay.

 

Tried to insert some photos of the garden







doesnt seem to have been a complete sucess