Amateur Gardening 11-Jun-2022

“This week, Ruth Hayes asks Dr Anton Rosenfeld of Garden Organic for his advice on using peat-free compost and how to create your own mix for growing seeds (see page 7). Dr Rosenfeld has some useful tips for creating a good seed compost mix, which I think will be a great help to many who have had difficulty in finding workable peat-free options. If there is a benefit to the ban on peat, aside from the obvious environmental one, it is that we will have to have a better understanding of the growing medium we use to nurture our plants far more than ever before - and I believe this will make us better gardeners.”…

WE’VE all heard it said – and maybe even said it ourselves – ‘There’s a patch in the garden that I can do absolutely nothing with’. No garden is perfect because only rarely will soil be naturally consistent across the whole area (you can even find different nutrient levels and pH values in the same plot), so there will always be places that are more tricky to cultivate than others. It may be a patch of heavy clay that puddles in winter, a spot of dry shade where the moisture is leached out by tree roots or blocked by a shadowing wall, or a bed of poor soil that simply fails to flourish no matter what you chuck at it. We have a couple of tricky patches in our garden, places with thin…

HERE at AG we like to ask the big questions and when it comes to gardening, few come larger than querying the makeup of the very stuff we try and grow our plants in. Which is why scientist Anton Rosenfeld, who works for the horticultural charity Garden Organic, laughed when I posed the question. “That is a very big question!” he said, before going on to explain the various components and compounds that make up the soil under our feet. “There are the mineral components make up of whatever rock is below the ground, either sandy or clay. If it’s sand it has larger particles, whereas clay is made up of smaller particles.” Anton continued: “Then there is the organic matter, which is the important part for gardeners. The rock particles move up from…

AS the peat-free debate rumbles on, many gardeners are looking for ways of improving their soil and raising plants in a planet-friendly ways. AG spoke to Dr Anton Rosenfeld, the knowledge officer at the horticultural charity Garden Organic who is an authority on how to make your own peatfree compost and how to successfully grow different plants in peat-free soil including watering and feeding regimes. He agrees that many gardeners have neither the space nor capacity to make enough of their own compost to enrich all their garden, but can offer solutions to the ‘peat-free compost gap’. “Homemade compost is the ideal, and the more you can make on site the better,” he said, “because it is made where you want to use it so there are no ‘compost miles’ involved transporting it…

IN the April 23 issue I explained how I planted this year’s crop of seed potatoes in my border after enriching the soil with a mixture of leaf mould, well-rotted manure, wood ash and topsoil. I did this to replenish nutrients as they would be have been depleted after last year’s crop and I wanted to give the soil a boost. The good news is that this mixture of treatments appears to have done the job and many young leaves have poked their heads through the soil and are looking strong and healthy. Of course, growing potatoes does not end with soil prep and planting – there is still earthing-up, feeding and watering to be done. Earth up, feed and water Earthing up: ONCE the plants have broken the surface the next task is…

THERE is so much to do in the garden at this time of year that it can be hard to keep track of everything you need to do. I often set out with the intention of watering the greenhouse for example, then get sidetracked by a cluster of weeds that have popped up in a border, which leads to something completely different (maybe an ailing plant that I’ll pot up to see if that helps it) and before I know it the morning has gone and the greenhouse is still parched! The most pressing jobs at the moment are making sure our plants stay healthy and pest free, and the easiest way to do this is to keep on top of weeding and feeding regimes. A little bit of weeding every couple of…