How to Buy Soil

Are you ready to geek out with me about soil? Good. Because soil is everything. Here’s why…

Hello you lovely lot. This is my monthly Tale - a story from life in the veg patch - which is free to all subscribers. If you’d like to consider upgrading to a paid subscription, it costs less than a fancy packet of seeds a month and you’ll receive a monthly video (like this), a weekly recipe with PDF recipe card (like this) and plenty more (see here). Don’t worry, there’s still plenty to go at on a free subscription – a monthly recipe, regular newsletter and this tale.

Whichever subscription you pick, I’m delighted you’re here and prepared to geek out with me about soil…

The other weekend I went shopping for soil. I know. Exciting times.

Well, between you and me, that it was quite thrilling. Because, in a veg patch, nothing is more important than the soil. The very wise market gardener, Anna Greenland, once said to me,

Cultivate the soil, not the plants. If you get the earth right, the plants will take care of themselves.

I had listened and nodded, then got distracted by the immediate gratification of sowing seeds and totally failed to heed her advice.

Until recently, I’d just added council green waste compost to my soil each year. Council compost what happens to your food waste caddy contents and anything that goes in the green garden waste bin for collection. I’d buy it in big sacks then spread a thick layer on top of the beds sometime between December and March. (This, by the way is known as the No Dig Method and is a much better approach to soil improvement than the traditional Double Dig approach where you turn the compost into the existing soil, not least because it doesn’t involve all that back breaking digging, but mainly because it keeps the soil structure intact, improving the mycorrhizal bacterial systems which, we are just learning, have a huge impact on the way nutrients are carried through the soil from plant to plant. It’s basically soil magic and shoving a spade into it every year rather breaks the spell. That and all the worms you cut in half which is sad.

Anyway, I had been adding this compost topping religiously to whatever space I was growing in at the time. So, when I built raised beds the other year, and filled them, in part, with soil from the flower beds and lawn they were built on top of, I started adding council waste compost on top as usual. However, turns out the recycled soil from the flower beds etc is very, well, patchy – sometimes clay-y, sometimes free-draining; stony here, still full of a naturalised bulbs there. All muddled around underneath very friable, and quite woody, green waste compost. The result is you don’t know from one foot to the next what sort of soil you’re sticking your trowel into and neither do the vegetables, which makes for somewhat haphazard results.

Which is how I came to find myself standing before rows of plastic tubs filled with earth at our local landscape and garden supplies firm shopping for soil.

And it turns out that buying soil is far more exciting than I thought it would be.

It is rather like buying pick and mix was as a 10-year-old. Newsagents of the 1980s used to have open tubs of penny (or if you’re really old like me, halfpenny) sweets behind a glass counter at the front of the shop. Well, buying soil is pretty much the same: open square plastic tubs full of different soils for you to view. Unlike the sweets, you can handle the soil to gauge its texture, but then you go to the shopkeeper, just like at the sweet shop, and say, “I’ll have half a tonne of horticultural loam, one tonne of landscape 20, a bag of 70:30 topsoil and mushroom compost mix, 2 sacks of top dressing and a quarter of pear drops.”

Admittedly the volumes are different (though only slightly in the case of my sugar-fuelled childhood), but it turns out that the sense of anticipation is just the same as penny sweet buying. All that potential for pleasure, the anticipation of a feast to come, the sense of agency at buying something that will make life more fun, more colourful, more moreish.

I order 3 tonnes bags filled with a heady mix of top soil, compost and sharp sand which is delivered a few days later and I spend a back-breaking weekend barrowing it all from the end of the drive and shovelling it into the beds.

And now for a confession. I do break the rules of no dig at this point.

Just a little bit. By turning the new compost into the soil below, just a little. Only a shallow tickle, but I haven’t got a year to leave the beds fallow so the worms and bugs can drag the new soil down into the old, so I steal myself to a spot of digging to mix everything in and pray for forgiveness from Charles Dowding, patron saint of No Dig.

If you are about to buy soil for your vegetable beds, here are my top tips:

1. Peat free. Always. You all know why, I don’t need to explain to the likes of you the catastrophic environmental damage done when peat bogs are dug up. If you’re buying 20-50l bags from the garden centre check on the label to see if it’s peat free. If it is, it’ll say so in big letters on the front. If not, they’ll try to confuse you by saying they are ‘committed to reducing peat use’ and show a little pie chart or sliding scale illustrating how 30% of this compost is peat free. Which is nonsense. And lazy. And a bit weaselly. So don’t buy it.

2. If in doubt, multi-purpose. Don’t get hung up on levels of nutrients like whether a plant needs nitrogen or potash or whether it’s sterilised loam or John Innes Number whatever. These things do make a difference to the way the plant grows, but honestly, I find it all such a faff to understand that I ignore it and don’t really feel like my veg come to too much harm. My favourite multipurpose compost brands are New Horizon Organic Peat Free from Westland which is widely available in garden centres. Also try Sylvagrow Organic Compost from Melcourt. For a special treat I highly recommend Dalefoot Composts who make peat-free compost from a blend of sustainable sheep’s wool and bracken sourced from the Lake District. It’s more expensive but their whole range, including the seed compost, is knock out.

3. Animal additions. Assuming you aren’t vegan, you can feed your plants during the growing season by adding poo. Don’t worry, it’s not as gross as it sounds. The product I prefer is chicken manure pellets which are about the size of dried macaroni and come in big tubs. You scatter handfuls over the soil, ideally just before it rains, and the nutrients slowing leach into the soil over the course of 3-4 weeks. I just chuck it on whenever I remember between March and October. You can also buy it in a fibrous form that looks more like compost called 6X by Vitax. It stinks to high heaven, but is a much faster acting option. Just don’t do it before a garden party because it really reeks. I tend to avoid horse manure because I find it makes the soil too clumpy and can burn the plants if you get a chunk of it near a leaf.