The old adage — you only get out what you put in — certainly applies to gardening, especially to soil maintenance.

Growing crop after crop, flower upon flower, year after year, without carrying out necessary and ongoing soil maintenance, is to witness a steady decline in crop and flower quality and quantity and an increase in general garden pests and diseases.

Healthy plants have an inbuilt capacity to fight off pests and diseases whilst weaker ones surrender at the drop of a hat.

It cannot be stressed often enough that healthy plants require healthy, rich and nourishing soil for them to grow and remain in tip top condition and that continuous feeding of the soil — naturally not chemically — is the basic recipe, and an essential one, for a successful and rewarding garden.

Some gardeners simply do not have the patience to wait six months to a full year for a home-made compost heap/bin to mature and employ a variety of ‘instant fixes’ in the mistaken belief that these are just as good as the pure gold of fully matured compost. This misconception is encouraged by what are, to an experienced gardener, absolutely ludicrous online videos demonstrating things such as ‘instant compost making’, ‘compost in five minutes’, ‘compost in less than an hour’ and so on; videos which really are the stuff of nightmares indeed.

Healthy plants require healthy, rich, nourishing soil to grow. But feeding the soil requires patience

Pushing vegetable and fruit peels through a household mincing or chopping machine does not produce compost. It produces minced or chopped vegetable and fruit peels that are perfect ingredients to add to a compost heap/bin in which a mixture of suitable organic materials (as explained two weeks ago) are placed and left to completely rot down into a humus-rich, nutrient-rich, soil-type compost that, after six to 12 months, will be ready to use in the garden. Applying freshly minced/chopped vegetable and fruit waste around your seedlings and plants is to invite disaster, as this waste naturally heats up, staying surprisingly hot for a fairly long period of time during the natural rotting down and composting process. If minced/chopped and immediately spread around plants, this sloppy gunge, when it heats up, can destroy plants and their tender roots, burning them to a frazzle. This is not ‘instant compost’ — it is almost instant plant death!

If a thing is worth doing. it is worth doing properly, and properly made compost is riches like no other.

Compost — real compost — should be added to the soil at every opportunity: a shovel-full here, a shovel-full there, whenever you are transplanting, by the bucketful when you are making seed-beds or mixing soil/compost for use in seed trays/pots/containers, and by the wheelbarrow-full when preparing or renewing flower, herb and vegetable beds. You can never apply too much compost, and every single form of soil life, and the plants you chose to grow, will thank you for this in a multitude of ways — the most visible being wonderful plants and bountiful crops.

Mulch, on the other hand, is laid directly on the soil surface, being pulled down into the earth by industrious soil life and by the actions of air, sun and water. Mulch, because fresh organic material heats up before decomposing, must not come in direct contact with plant stems; it is laid around and between plants without touching them. Whilst compost is heaped up and left to rot down in a heap/bin, mulch does exactly the same but on the soil surface. Mulch is not ‘instant compost’ either but it does feed the soil faster than waiting for compost to mature.

We have discussed both compost ingredients and mulching materials many times in the past — a good reference being the column of March 17, 2019 which is easy to find on the internet — and quick fix, compost tea, is detailed there too.

A suitable location for compost heaps/bins seems to be a problem for some of you, especially so for those with quite small gardens.

There is, however, a useful way of making compost without building a traditional large heap or struggling to find place for a large compost bin.

Compost can be made, very successfully I must add, here and there, in elongated mounds of whatever height and width you are comfortable with, in the garden itself. I use such mounds as divisions between garden beds, breaking them open after about six to nine months, spreading the ‘made’ compost on the adjoining beds and relaying anything that hasn’t fully rotted down as the base of a new mound.

Such mounds are best started off with a twiggy base and are then built up, over a period of time, with whatever compost material is to hand. Once a mound is judged wide enough and high enough, it is covered over with a thin layer of soil and left to get on with composting itself down. Inevitably, it soon grows a covering of lovely green grass and assorted weeds which, with overall garden tidiness in mind, can be clipped right back — the clippings being added to an under-construction mound elsewhere in the garden — so that all is neat, tidy and verdant green.

Compost heaps/mounds shrink down significantly during their first three to four weeks from starting them off. You can then add to them again, with mounds, before topping them off with soil.

Happy gardening and Happy New Year.

Please continue sending your gardening queries to zahrahnasir@hotmail.com. Remember to include your location. The writer does not respond directly by email. Emails with attachments will not be opened.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 29th, 2019