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Back to the soil

Ursula Buchan

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

Ursula Buchan does a spot of gardening

There was a time when kitchen gardening, whether pursued on the allotment or in the garden, was ridiculously space-consuming. Vegetables were grown in wide apart, hoe-able rows, with gaps at intervals for the gardener to wheel a wheelbarrow along. These vegetables themselves were leafy, coarse and often pretty dull, particularly the old staples like potatoes, leeks, parsnips, celery and runner beans. The digging of the necessary trenches could only ever appeal to moles. But all that was before the benefits of the ‘raised bed’ and ‘no-dig’ systems were widely understood, and before there was a rich variety of vegetable cultivars that suited the private gardener as much, if not more, than the commercial grower.

A raised bed, if you have never seen one, is a four-foot-wide rectangle, bounded by pressure-treated wooden boards and standing about six inches proud of the ground. It contains a fertile, well-drained mixture of soil and organic matter. In this mix, seed can be sown at roughly two thirds the intervals necessary in conventional plots, both because of the soil’s fertility and because the bed can be tended from narrow paths on both sides, so that there is no harmful compaction of the growing medium itself. Small seed can be broadcast rather than sown in rows. Yields tend to be higher, weeding is a doddle and physical protection against pests and frost is much easier in these regular and confined spaces. Most importantly, exhausting autumn digging need only be done once; after that, keeping the soil aerated and fertile is simply a matter of an annual forking-in of organic matter, such as compost, rotted farmyard manure, wool shoddy, mushroom compost, or whatever is locally available.

The plant breeders have come to our aid as well, in particular by producing vegetable varieties which are resistant to many pests and diseases. After all, no one is inclined to spray pesticides on to the food they eat. The carrot, ‘Flyaway’, is genuinely left untouched by carrot fly, and there are now blight-resistant potatoes of Hungarian origin, called ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Sarpo Axona’.