How to improve your flowers and vegetables with Turfandstuff Manure and Compost

Depending on your soil type, garden history and what plants you are looking to cultivate, you will be aiming at slightly different results.

Where you have sticky, wet silty/clay soils you want to incorporate true "soil conditioners" like our compost or composted bark. These are slower to break down and very high in organic matter. They have the effect of "holding apart" the clay particles and so allowing the soil to breakdown, become more friable and drain better. Go here to find out more about heavy soils:

If you have achieved a friable, open soil then you want to add products that will replace the nutrients removed by flowers and vegetables. If you have a vegetable plot from which you remove and eat large amounts of food (for example potatoes or brassicas such as cabbage or cauliflower) then you must regularly replace these nutrients. The best product for doing this is cow manure. It has an average nutrient content as below:

0.6% N : 0.3% P : 0.65% K : 0.25% S: 0.15% Mg

The humus fraction of these manures create air cavities within your soil which is then able to hold a greater amount of water. This will become vitally important with the current threat of hosepipe bans.

If you are looking to raise your pH to grow clematis, lilacs brassicas etc. (you can even help to control clubroot in brassicas) then use an application of Spent Mushroom Compost

Above is an interesting table that shows how pH affects the availability of all the major and trace elements. Note that Manganese, Iron, Molybdenum and Calcium all affected close to the neutral point (pH 6.5).

All these products should be dug in to the soil, especially the dung, as some of the nitrogen will be lost, through volatilisation, to the atmosphere. You can however use them as mulches and let the action of worms and annual cultivation do the mixing. You will not get as much benefit in year one.

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