Article submitted by James ( free seeds on their way)

Soil care

Soil is a deep subject (no pun intended, really) and caring for your soil is dependent on many of its qualities.

The soil in your yard is a mixture of many things inherited from its past. Included are bits of rock, living and dead plants and animals, mostly of microscopic size, air and water. What types these are, and their proportion in the general mixture, decides your soil's characteristics.

Good points and bad ones relate back to the soil's history. For instance: Did it originate as leaf mold on a forest floor? What type of rock was the "parent" that produced most of its mineral content? Was it extensively farmed and then reborn as a subdivision? Was it a deep layer of subsoil, brought to the surface by the builder of your home? Such things determine secondary characteristics too, such as whether worms and microorganisms are abundant, whether fertility has accumulated, and whether cultivation is easy.

No matter what sort of soil you have, there are a number of things you can do to improve it for a particular purpose, or for future use. But even though we share the same locality, your soil is very likely to be different from others and you must decide what to do about it on the basis of its own characteristics.

Horse Manure:

Considered by many gardeners to be the finest sort of animal manure you can use. Riding schools and stables often have large quantities of horse manure that they will be happy to give away or at least sell cheaply. Often they are prepared to deliver and even in a city you may well find sources. In London the army and police both have stables that have been know to give away their waste problem to grateful gardeners.

Check your local paper for an advert or just call local stables and ask.

The best horse manure comes from stables that bed their horses on straw. Manure from horses bedded on wood shavings takes much longer to rot down but is still well worth having.

Check the manure and if it contains a large proportion of wood shavings in relation to dung and urine, then pile it for a year before using it in the garden.