Just the other day, I discovered a half-empty bottle of Lucozade placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. A visiting architect joked, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” giving me a new perspective.
In short, the garden is a bit of a mess. Sometimes neglect has its perks; after returning from holiday, I spotted a sunflower growing in the back corner.
This week, though, some necessary firefighting is underway. As I’m expecting a baby, I’ve enlisted a professional gardener to tackle troublesome weeds like a prickly weed and robinia saplings from the neighbour’s tree, while leaving the good stuff. Next, in the newly cleared patches, I’ll be sowing green manure.
Green manure are superheroes when it comes to boosting soil quality.
My gardening friend Claire has written about cover crops, as they are essential in crop rotation for vegetable plots. However, the only things I’m harvesting from my garden right now are a few foraged apples and some hardy herbs.
My ambitions for the garden are simple and steady – and improving the soil is top of the list. To update concerned readers, the scaffolding is for roof repairs, and the garden boundaries are still wobbly, but the neighbours are on board with replacing them.
Cover crops are like superheroes for soil health. Bare soil invites weeds, which is why weeds appear. But by sowing fast-growing plants, you can suppress weeds, bring in bees, shelter beneficial insects, and fix nitrogen.
Green manure plants may not look exciting – though some, like certain lupin varieties and a flowering legume, have pretty flowers – but their role is to thrive rather than look decorative. After they’ve grown, you can turn them under, cut them for compost, or leave them on the surface for worms to incorporate. The real magic happens below the surface.
Now is the ideal time for sowing these cold-season plants. I’ve chosen forage rye, which breaks up heavy earth, a nitrogen-lifter, vetch, and field beans.
There’s satisfaction in sowing something knowing it’s temporary – on the surface, anyway.
