Over winter I did quite a lot of soil work in the garden. Having tried the no dig which I have managed to get to a minimal dig method. The soil I have is great from the years of mostly organic practices and earthworms were prolific.
The trick was now to add the second form of decomposition which is the fungal decomposition. I did try this with leavss and leaf mould, but did not get it right.
This winter I went down to the creak and there are a lot of Pine trees with plenty of fungal activity under them. Now I did not want to interfere with the natural ecosystem there, so only took small 30cm2 blocks of the topsoil layer from every 2nd tree. This I added on top of lawn clippings, along with a layer of leaves and topped with pea straw to try seed the natural fungi into the leaves.
Well now at the end of spring, samples looked at near the end of the beds has great fungal growth in the top mulch layers, that is 6 months of growth. I am pleased with the success of this. The Olla bed was disturbed and will see in Autumn if I need to repeat the process for this bed, and the Brassica were left alone so this winter it will be done.
I watched a You tube Video from The Weedy Garden. He is an interesting guy, doing some odd things, certainly way out of my scope of comfort (I rather flush the toilets and sleep in my warm bed in the house😂) but there are so many lessons to learn from these people. He talks about composition (growing) is only possible when we have the correct decomposition. Hopefully the introduction will get me 1 step closer to the healthiest soil possible!
We have rain here today so no gardening for me. Hope everyone had a great weekend!
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