- Hello, and a very warm welcome back to the garden.
Today's video is about how to overcome the challenge
of not having enough compost
and sharing seven tricks to do so.
(peaceful music)
So the first strategy of dealing
with a lack of compost is to actually consider
having a break year.
This is a year where you don't actually add any compost
onto the bed.
You just utilize whatever's already in the ground.
And that's exactly what I'm doing with this bed.
And as you can see,
all the plants are looking pretty healthy.
This isn't really a technique
that you can apply starting from today,
'cause we're in the middle of the season here in the UK,
but what you can do is actually use it
as a principle moving forward.
So usually I will mulch most of my beds in autumn,
finish them off in spring.
But if there's a few where I think,
"Actually, they were really healthy. The soil looks good,"
you could actually skip a year
and save the amount of compost you need
to mulch your garden.
I think every garden has beds where we're just really happy
with the quality of the soil and others not so.
Here's an example of one that I'm not so happy.
So rather than trying to grow really hungry crops
that need a lot of nutrition like cauliflowers
and then all the fruiting crops like squash and tomatoes,
what I'm actually doing in this bed is
I'm going to be dedicating it to crops
that need less fertility.
Legumes are a great example.
These are actually field beans.
These are designed to be planted out on a big field,
not in a really compost-rich raised bed.
So, actually adapting the type of crops that you grow
to suit poorer soils.
I'm gonna be growing a lot more, kind of,
more leafy greens here as well
and then applying just a little bit
of liquid fertilizer to help them.
That's a really simple way to actually turn the issue
of low-quality soil into
actually just change what crops you grow in there.
So when you apply compost to a bed,
what you're doing is you're adding carbon,
microbes, and nutrients.
But all this compost was just plants that have broken down.
But you can actually skip making compost
by using a technique called Chop, Move, and Drop,
which adds microbes, nutrients, and carbon to the soil,
but it breaks down on the soil,
rather than waiting in the compost bin for a few months.
So, Chop, Move, and Drop utilizes the fact
that there's nutrients around the area.
This comfrey here is a perfect example.
I'm gonna chop it down and take it
and put it over the beds.
And that's gonna add a load of nutrients
to kind of supplement compost,
because this will break down into compost anyway.
So what actually happens is when you put cut plant material
like this directly on the surface of the soil,
and here I'm mulching a nicely advanced tomato plant,
it breaks down a lot faster than in a compost bin
and the nutrients are there.
So, as you start watering them
and it breaks down you can bring them down into the roots.
Now, you might notice that these tomatoes also mulch
with grass clippings
and that brings us onto the next trick.
The more seasons I do in the garden,
the more I fall in love with grass clippings.
And it's using grass clippings
from grass that hasn't yet gone to seed,
otherwise you'll be basically spreading future lawns around.
But grass clippings are amazing.
It's a very similar technique to Chop Move and Drop,
but what you are actually doing is the emphasis
of the grass clippings is also on retaining moisture.
And retaining moisture in the soil is beneficial
for so many ways, as we know.
We don't want the plants drying out.
But it's also beneficial for the microbes in the soil
to have that moisture to stay alive or at least stay active
and help provide plants with nutrients.
And then, of course, as a final benefit,
as these grass clippings break down,
they're providing a really nice amount
of nutrients and also carbon to the soil,
which in turn helps to increase the soil health
and increase the amount of water the soil can hold onto.
When you apply grass clippings to your garden,
it actually depends how slug-prone your climate is,
depending on the layer that you want to add.
So, we're really fortunate in this garden
with barely any slug problems whatsoever.
So I do go around and make, kind of,
two to three centimeter-deep mulches with grass clippings,
which makes a big difference.
But if you do have a lot of slugs,
going for around a centimeter will help
reduce any potential slug issues
but still allow you to benefit from using grass clippings.
Another trick to help overcome an issue
of not having enough compost is
to actually water your plants
with a jadam microbial solution.
I recently made a short about showing how simple it is
to make jadam microbial solution.
You use leaf mold, potatoes, and sea salts,
and it works really, really well.
And it's really simple.
And what you're doing is you're inoculating
and propagating a load of negative microbes
from leaf mold and from your area.
And then you're watering your beds with that.
And what you do is you provide a big boost of microbes,
not just to help increase overall soil health
and the health of your plants
but also to help kickstart microbial activity
and the breakdown of nutrients to make them plant available.
So what you're actually doing is similar
to just adding compost,
but you're just adding microbes
to help get more of those nutrients
that's already in the soil
more plant available to help those plants
and bypass the need for as much compost
when times are tough.
So, if you can get into a habit
of just applying JMS once a month around your garden beds,
especially prioritizing poorer beds,
it's gonna make a really big difference
to your plant health and future soil health.
Now there's another way
that watering can help you overcome the challenge
of a lack of compost,
but we'll come onto that after the next tip.
So another little trick you can do is actually
an adaptation of trench composting.
This is usually where you bury kitchen scraps
in a trench, cover with soil, and then plant on top.
You can actually do this for individual plants.
So what I'm gonna do is create a fairly deep hole,
much deeper than this dwarf bean here.
And I've got some scraps I'm gonna place at the bottom.
And then I'm gonna put a tiny bit of compost over the top.
And then I now transplant the plant.
And what that does is as the roots start working downwards
and as the plant mat underneath starts to break down,
it's gonna help provide the nutrients
and just what this plant needs.
We're behind the polycrub
and this is our main fermentation station.
We're actually creating a lot of liquid feeds here,
all crop-specific.
This is Swede, for example.
We've got then more general multipurpose ones,
like nettles and grass clippings.
But JADAM liquid fertilizer is such an easy way
of creating a really beneficial plant amendment
and soil amendment just using stuff that you have.
And you inoculate it with leaf mold
and then you just dilute it and water it to your plants.
This here is a JADAM liquid fertilizer.
It's something that you can scale.
And I am gonna do a dedicated video about it, I promise.
This is a grass clipping one
that we've had for about a month now.
And you can see that really dark color.
So what I'm basically doing is diluting it,
1 to 30, 1 to 40 in a watering can
and I'm watering my plants.
Now, grass clippings and grass is the easiest one
to get started with.
And this video right here is gonna show you
everything you need to know
to make your own JADAM liquid grass fertilizer today
to help your plants and your garden from two weeks from now.