"Inge Jones" wrote in message
. ..
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?

Contact your local authority and ask them if they operate a
composting system for vegetable household refuse. More and
more are now doing it as part of an enlightened recycling
programme.

Or, try and locate a mushroom farm near you. Many of them
sell bagged spent mushroom compost quite cheaply. The stuff
has a lovely earthy smell, and often you are rewarded with a
crop of some mushrooms as well.

Franz