By Clodagh and Dick Handscombe active gardeners and gardening authors living in Spain for twenty five years.
 

January is a good time for the annual garden cleanup and also to start to prepare your soil for Spring plantings. This is important for flowering plants, herbs, flowering and fruiting shrubs and trees and vegetables whether grown in the open garden or in containers of various types and sizes.

Improvement entails adding sand to open up heavy clay soils, composts and peat to improve the water absorbing capacity and humus content and well rotted wet or dried animal manures to enrich the soil. Bags of worm compost, compost including sea weed from the Eco Parks that are springing up around the country are also excellent soil improvers . If you have a very poor soil add 40% by volume of the above additives to 60% of the original soil. Something we learned on a study tour to Cuba a few years ago.

Mix up soil mixes for containers on a similar basis. Typical mixes are given in each of our books.

If you do this the critical development of root balls will be accelerated, green growth will grow steadily and healthily and you will not need to resort to the use of fast acting chemical fertilizers to maintain plant growth. This has two benefits, Firstly you will not need to store potentially hazardous materials which is especially important if you have children and pets in the household.

Secondly you will not stimulate unnecessarily fast weak growth that is susceptible to attacks by pests and diseases.

There are two other soil additives worth considering namely neem powder from Trabe www.trabe.net and Terracottem soil conditioner www.terravida.com. The first acts as a gentle fertilizer and controller of snails and slugs while the second has the power to improve the moisture holding capacity of the soil by 200% reducing the extent and frequency of watering required.

If you have inherited a fully stocked garden that struggles to survive the summer we suggest that you improve the soil around the plants down to the depth of the bottom of the root ball to improve their chances of long term survival and continuing good crops of flowers, fruit and vegetables.

Luckily the soil is currently in good condition to carry out the above tasks. Do them manually using mattocks rather than spades and forks if you have a relatively small area of soil to prepare. If a larger area reduce the back aching work by buying a small rotovator or hiring the village mechanical plough. Or perhaps you are lucky that your village still has a working mule or donkey for hire. A way of preserving rural practices, minimising the compression of the soil and with luck getting some free manure in the process. Offer to give the animal a good feed before it starts to wok – this might increase the extent of the manure bonus! *There latest three books are ‘Your Garden in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’. You can obtain them from bookshops and via www.santanabooks.com and www.gardeninginspain.com.
 

CLODAGH AND DICK’S BEST SELLING BOOKS
	‘Your Garden in Spain – From planning to planting and maintenance’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ can be obtained from bookshops Carrefor and from internet shops such as Santana Books, Amazon . They can also be ordered by telephone on 952 485838. Remember there is much work to do this autumn so do it right.

© Clodagh and Dick Handscombe www.gardeninginspain.com January 2010.