Improve soil health ahead of the growing season

The first step to improving your garden soil is to identifying which soil type you have. In the UK there are six types, clay, chalk, loams, peat, sandy and silt, each comes with its own positive and negative characteristics and you can adapt and enhance it to ensure you have fertile soil all year round. See the RHS’s soil guide to check which variety you have.

If you are a keen gardener or you grow your own vegetables and fruit you will probably dig the soil over or cultivate it fairly regularly, if this is the case you need to provide a combination of nutrients that will enhance it.

To get started, remove the weeds and as much of their roots as possible to prevent them growing back and begin to dig the ground over, digging will loosen the soil and also expose some of the larvae from garden pests such as slugs and snails, leave these for the birds to deal with. If you are following a no-dig routine, details can be found here. 

There is a lot of advice around adding ‘organic matter’ to the soil to help improve it, the term itself is fairly ambiguous and many of us assume that it means add compost when the two actually differ significantly.

The next stage is to add a nutrient-rich soil improver, the SoilFixer SF60 Super Compost is ideal for use in domestic gardens and allotments and contains high levels of colloidal humus and biochar the combination of these two ingredients acts as a sponge for water and essential nutrients which contribute to improved plant health and resilience against extreme weather conditions such as drought and frost, the biochar acts as a host to a series of microbes which transfer nutrients from the ‘sponge’ the nutrients right down to the plants’ roots.

We call SF60 a ‘Super Compost’ because not only is it packed with valuable ingredients, it also offers numerous additional benefits, it can be used to improve garden soil, its results are long-lasting as the biochar remains in the soil for over 100 years, plus both biochar and colloidal humus sequester carbon which means using them in the garden helps to offset greenhouse gases. 

If you don’t have an area that can be dug over but you have established beds and borders you can still use SF60 and get all of the benefits, simply fork it in as a top dressing around existing plants and shrubs and leave it to its hard work.

To buy SF60 and to find out more information click the button below.