Boosting your soil’s health is crucial for cultivating a thriving, vibrant garden that’s not only beautiful, but also kind to our planet.
In this guide, we’ll explore natural techniques such as composting, cover cropping, and crop rotation that can significantly improve soil health while benefitting the environment.
To improve soil health naturally in organic gardening, gardeners can add compost and other organic matter to enrich the soil, use cover crops to prevent erosion and fix nitrogen, practice crop rotation to prevent depletion of nutrients, and mulch to retain moisture.
One of the most effective techniques to enhance soil health naturally is by adding compost and organic matter to your garden. Rich in nutrients, compost is made from decomposed kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings, and other plant materials that have broken down over time.
A great example of how you can add organic matter to your garden is through sheet mulching. Start by layering cardboard or newspapers on top of the soil, followed by layers of green (e.g., freshly cut grass) and brown (e.g., fallen leaves) materials.
Finally, add a generous layer of well-aged compost or manure on top.
A key technique in naturally improving soil health is the use of cover crops. These plants, such as legumes, grasses or even certain garden vegetables like mustard, provide a wide range of benefits when grown alongside your primary crop.
Cover crops are effective at preventing soil erosion and nutrient leaching by anchoring the structure with their roots. Additionally, they can suppress weed growth by competing for resources, reducing maintenance work in your garden.
Some cover crops also have the ability to fix nitrogen – an essential plant nutrient
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A fad in modern architecture and gardening or a necessity to bring back nature into industrialised densely built urban landscapes? Living green walls are becoming more and more popular, so we decided to explore the benefits, installation and maintenance process of these structures. Read on to find out how long they have been around, why so many buildings are having them, and how you can make one for your home.
In Yorkshire we are lucky to have several gardens designed using the theme of a Himalayan Garden. The Hut near Ripon at Grewlthorpe is  ‘The Himalayan Garden’ with all the plants you would expect in such a setting including
Britain has some of the best gardens in the world. The choice of which to visit is far larger than this selective list but at least it gives you somewhere to start planning this years outings.
In the cold wet winter it is a good time to plan where to visit as the year improves. The South West is the obvious place to start your visiting tour of gardens containing exotic plants.
China is one of the great destinations for visiting gardens. The influence over garden design and the vast array of plants and flowers is secondary to the investment in time and dedication demonstrated in so many great locations. This is just a selection of those you may consider visiting if you can make the journey..
Peace is not just the absence of war it can be a reflection of a personal inner tranquility. To many gardeners peace may be a state of harmony with nature. It is a theme of several ‘hard landscape’ projects and sculptural works as shown by the selection of Peace gardens below.
Holland Park has some Zen like features but fails my Zen test. The classic elements of a successful Zen are stone, sand or gravel, water, plants and space. Then there is a question of balance between yin and yang. Cramped or cluttered gardens inhibit the flow of spirit so space is potentially the key ingredient of a Zen garden.
I was picking the Czar plums to make more jam when a wasp was disturbed from eating it’s lunch. Wasps go for my plums just as they are at their sweetest best. My problem was I couldn’t see which plums had a wasp in the fruit if they were above head height or facing away from my hand. The resulting sting set me on the trail of other stingers in the garden.
Not what you would expect for a garden called ‘The Phoenix Garden’ in the middle of Tottenham Court Road near Crown Point. It isn’t a phoenix from the ashes of a great fire or a WW11 bomb site at but was built on a disused car park in the 1980s. It may be part of an overflowing burial ground for St Giles-in-the-field church back in the 1600s and is reputed to be the last surviving Covent ‘Garden’. The entrance is located in St Giles Passage
Summer at the South Carolina Botanical Garden (SCBG) that is a fun time filled with summer camps and children laughing and learning. Below are some of the simple, low cost ideas we used in our Creativity Camp to get children outside, where they enjoyed nature, and tapped into their creativity.