29-03-2004, 06:35 PM
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Compost
In article ,
says...
The last thing you want to do is dispose of precious old stuff! It's
black gold.
Mulched soil doesn't "rise up too much". As the mulch material
decomposes it shrinks; worms drag it down, eat digest and expell it, and
ultimately, plants feed on the broken down components. I often pile on
mulch at least 6 inches thick on the soil surface; by the end of a
growing season it will have completely disappeared, the soil is at much
the same level as it was before mulching...but much richer.
Think about it; mulch becomes the humus in soil. Plants are built from
what they extract from the humus. Left to their own devices, they
ultimately return to the soil when they die, to become humus in their
turn. When we pull out, or prune plants, we're interrupting that cycle
of soil-replenishment and taking something away. In other words, beds
that are continually cropped, whose soil is not replenished with
soil-building material, gradually shrinks.
Janet.
Yes that makes sense. Thing is I've got such a tiny garden that when we
bought some manure and soil improver last year before planting, it all
heaped up several inches! The fact we'd just dug it all didn'thelp,
because that always puffs it out a bit too.
Well I'm not going to have a compost heap of my own and the neighbours
don't either as that would take up about 20% of the planting area, so
what's the best easily-available bagged stuff to spread each year?
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