The Best Way to Improve Your Soil and Make Your Plants Grow!

I'd have this as an air freshener in a room, it's absolutely glorious. Hello to all my fellow gardeners. Today I'm going to show you how you can give your plants a boost, seal in moisture and reduce watering, and make sure that weeds have much less chance of growing, and the answer is mulch. So what is a mulch? Basically it's a thick layer of well-rotted organic matter laid on the surface of the soil. You can use several different materials. This is my homemade garden compost. It's been rotting in a bin, that's an enclosure made of wood, for about a year now. It rots quicker in summer than in winter. You can get compost out of it in about three months if you're lucky, with the following wind. Generally speaking it's a good six months but I leave mine for a year. I fill up a bin, put a bit of old carpet over the top when the bin's full. What's in it? All the green waste from the veg patch behind me, stuff that I've cut down in the garden in autumn, herbaceous perennials, things like that. Anything soft and green, no food products, no bread or anything other than potato peelings. That goes in and mix it up well, keep it moist, keep it firm and that way it will rot. If it dries out, rotting will stop. So moist, firm and mixed, that's your answer for garden compost and now it's ready to use. If you don't have a facility to make your own compost or you've just come into gardening and you haven't had that year to make it, you can get lots of different kind of mulch materials in bags. Just check that whatever you buy is peat free. We need to conserve our areas of peat moor and peat bog so don't use anything with peat in it. There's lots of choice without peat. A lot of them will be labelled soil improver. This one is based on farmyard waste, anaerobically digested. The great thing about it is it's easy to handle, it's quite friable and it also has nutrition in it and that means that when the worms take this down into the soil from that surface mulch, they're improving your soil at the same time, adding nutrients as well as this organic field that you've got here. So for me, a bag like this is really useful and a 50 litre bag will cover about four square metres. That's how to do your calculation. But when it comes to longest lasting, perhaps one of these is your best bet. The answer, if you want durability, long lasting mulch, is bark. Stripped off pine trees mainly when they're used for timber. There are two distinct kinds. The first is composted bark, wonderfully friable stuff, a bit like the soil improver from the farmyard. It has a wonderfully woodland smell. I'd have this as an air freshener in a room, it's absolutely glorious. But as you can see, it's quite, if not powdery, then certainly very loose and again like the one based on the farmyard. The worms will take this down, it's a good organic enrichment for your garden soil. If you want one that lasts ages and ages and ages, which is best for paths, really just to keep down weeds and seal in moisture, then this is what you need. Much coarser, this is chipped bark. There are great lumps of bark in here. They're much, much slower to break down. What they won't do is add any fertility to your soil. No worm that hasn't got muscles is going to take this down into the ground. So this is very much a surface layer, particularly for paths, particularly perhaps between woodland shrubs where you're less concerned about nutrition in the soil and more with retaining moisture. The depth of them, just the same for all these, about two inches on the surface of the soil. I use all these different kinds in different parts of the garden, but generally speaking my favourite is one which will improve the soil as worms take it down and that would boil down to the soil improver. So can you just lay any of these in a two inch layer on moist weed-free soil, just like that? Well you could, but there's another little thing I like to do just before I put them down. I'll show you what. Always remember when you're loading up a barrow to put the majority of the weight, that end, over the wheel because it's much easier to pivot then. Now I could put this straight down on the surface of the soil here. It's moist, it's clean, it's level, but I want to give them even more chance of doing well. So before I lay the mulch I'm going to sprinkle on some fertiliser. This is an organic fertiliser, this is blood, bone and fish meal. It contains the three main plant nutrients, nitrogen, phosphates and potash, but they need to be broken down by soil bacteria before the plant can take them up and that means that you're encouraging a healthy soil rich in good bacteria. So for me the blood, fish and bone or blood, bone and fish, it can be any one you want, goes on the soil first. A couple of handfuls to each plant. Just sprinkle it around each clump of your perennials, around anything actually, roses, shrubs, whatever. Generally about a couple of handfuls to each plant on the surface. See these clumps here, I'm sort of wringing them with the blood, fish and bone and these yew trees will quite enjoy a bit as well. And once you've got that down you can then fork your mulch on top of it. Try to keep it off the crown of the plant, the very centre, there you can see is this hosta. Just gently spread it out, not too thinly, nice and thick, then it'll do its job. The important thing also is that when you put mulch down the soil is already moist. If you put it on dry soil it can sort of seal in the dryness as it were really, but you're sealing in moisture and making sure those plants have a constant supply which makes them grow evenly. The reason I don't put it on the centre of the clump itself is that sometimes if it's things like this which is based on farmyard waste, it can get a bit warm and you may well end up scorching the centre of the plant. Aim for a thickness of two to three inches, the thicker of course the more you'll need, but it really does do its job then. But I always think of this, having given the kids a good feed with the fertiliser and then put this over, it's really rather like tucking them into bed after a good square meal. And you know now that over the course of the summer that will rot down, the worms will help take it down into the soil which will enrich your beds and borders each year and then every spring put a new layer on, gosh your plants won't thank you for it. All you have to do now really is stand well back and enjoy your garden. I'll be posting new videos each week so subscribe to the channel below and let's get gardening together.