This week it’s: Soils and digging
FANS of archive radio comedy will know the programme Beyond our Ken, which aired on the BBC Light Programme from 1958-64. One of the characters in it, played by the comedian Kenneth Williams, was a gardener called Arthur Fallowfield. His response to any gardening question put to him was always: ‘The answer lies in the soil’. He wasn’t wrong!
As gardeners, we think of soil as that dark, crumbly, gritty layer we can see on the surface of our beds and borders. To a professional land worker or soil scientist, however, it is not just the top section (the ‘topsoil’) that we should worry about. There is also the ‘subsoil’, which can sometimes go down several metres before hitting rock. It generally contains no plant nutrients, organic matter or worm activity. So let’s
