7 Tips for better soil

We’ve said it countless times before: healthy plants need healthy soil. If your garden is blessed with beautiful, rich, loamy soil, then good for you. If not, you might need to improve it to get the most out of your garden. The good news is that even if you have sandy or clay soil, it can be improved until it can support a healthy plant population. The golden rule of improving soil is adding organic matter to it, and there are a number of ways of doing so. Here are seven things that you can do in your garden that will make a big difference to the quality and health of the soil:

1 Compost

When in doubt, add compost - we should put that on a bumper sticker. Compost is black gold for the garden, and you can use commercial compost or make your own. Good-quality compost looks like rich soil and smells like earth, with no odour of rotting or decay. The rotting or breaking-down process should already be complete, so that now the compost is full of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. You also don’t want to be able to recognise too many bits and pieces in