Landshare

The first thing to do when you finally lay your hands on your plot is to resist the urge to panic. Don’t allow yourself to swap the stress of searching for your piece of ground for the stress of having it. Have a wander around, take a few pictures and maybe make a sketch, but don’t be tempted into DOING anything constructive!

The first day should be just about getting to know your plot of earth. If you can, take a picnic (and a heavy blanket on which to enjoy it if the patch is a sea of weeds!), and you’ll be starting one of the secrets to having a successful veg patch – enjoying it for itself, rather than just as a source of food. If you find your plot is somewhere you want to be with your Sunday paper, your evening beer or for a picnic with friends and family, you’ll be making it a central part of what you do with your life, and you’ll love it all the more.

Just when you’re packing up to leave, pop a scoopful of soil into a food bag (minus the vegetation), and take it home with you. What you get out of your plot depends largely on what’s in that bag, so it pays to carry out an easy-to-do soil texture test.

Soil is made up of three main mineral components; clay, soil and sand and if you have these in reasonably even quantities you have that most marvelous of growing soils, the loam.

Identifying what soil type you have is straightforward – take a handful of moist soil and roll it between your hands to form a sausage. If it breaks apart straight away (and especially if it feels gritty) it is predominantly sand – great for warming up quickly in spring and draining well, but not for hanging on to moisture or nutrients.

If the sausage is smooth, holding its shape for a short while before breaking apart, it's mostly silt – keeping its nutrients and water better than a sandy soil but with poorer drainage and a tendency to compact relatively easily. If the sausage feels sticky and holds together easily, then your soil is clay - heavy to work and easily waterlogged. Clay soil often has higher levels of nutrients but they are not easily available to plants because clay tends to be acid and have few pores for the nutrients or roots to move through.

An even blend of all three – a loam - dilutes the downsides and gives you a share of the upsides of each. So what do you do if our soil isn’t the lovely loam? Firstly, it’s only at the extremes that you really need to take action, and that’s simply a matter of upping the levels of the two deficient components. Think of the soil as crumble topping: clay = butter; sand = sugar; silt = flour. To get the perfect mix you simply alter the balance of the ingredients to suit you: too dry/sandy - add clay; too sticky – add sand etc, but you’ll only really need to do this if your soil is strongly sandy, silty or clayey. Otherwise the best all round treatment for your patch is the compost you should start making – it has the effect of diluting any imbalances as well as replenishing nutrients and upping the fibre content of soil.

Once you’ve done that, time to put your wishlist into action and get growing!