Improving the soil

In our garden, there is a two-seater, brick-built privy. It hasn’t been used for 40 years or so, but its presence in the garden still has a direct influence on my gardening. Not only does the present paved path follow the direction of the original rough concrete one which led from house to privy but, more importantly, the soil in the borders close by is freer draining and more friable than that to be found anywhere else in the garden. The effect of the annual cleaning-out of the privy — on a moonlit night in August, I am told — and the spreading of the nightsoil (even the word is indicative of its use) on the nearest border was to lighten and make more workable the heavy, claggy, limestone ‘brash’ or clay, which is the naturally occurring soil in this garden. Near the privy, I can grow plants which struggle elsewhere, and I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for those unfastidious cottagers of old.

Further along the path is a disused goose house, whose occupants would once have added their fertility to the garden soil, as well as keeping down the grass by grazing. In days gone by, a pig would have been kept and fed on kitchen scraps, adding its own particularly rich manure to the soil. And, of course, ashes from house fires would have found their way on to the garden.

If you feel that this subject is not suitable for a gardening column, you would be wrong. Indeed, it is hard to think of anything more important to a gardener than the fertility and structure of his soil. Soil can make or mar a gardener’s designs. The hardest struggle I face is to improve my soil in just a few years, when it took my predecessors decades or more.