Removing slabs and hoping to plant some veg...

aligator_am

Hi Guys,

As the title suggests, the back garden is covered in paving slabs (we moved into the house before Christmas but the slabs have been in place for about 12 years I'm guessing)

Now, what I should point out is that I'm a total noob when it comes to gardening and the like, so any advice will be much appreciated

I mentioned it to the next door neighbour and she said when she did the same she found that the ground was very wet, and tended to get muddy / big puddles easily, what would this indicate?

Would I need to put down some fertiliser / compost to help the soil as it's been covered for so long?

I'm thinking of planting some veg in the coming months (any suggestions for stuff that could be planted around Winter time? or is that even posssible?) and wanted to see how the ground would need to be prepared in the weeks / months before planting.

Thanks in advance
Al

dfbemt

Aligator

I am a novice but I would suggest....

Soil is compacted so a good bit of work to do. I would advise waiting until Spring for planting as there is more variety than winter and it will give the soil time to improve. If you can get one area working and get some strawberry plants in before mid Autumn you should have a lovely crop next Summer, mmmmmm.

Certainly you will need to rotavate, dig and add plenty of organic matter such as farmyard manure, bone meal, etc. This will need to be dug in and do same again in Spring a few weeks before planting.

I found that taking your time is key, don't rush things. Sit down and plan everything out ie what needs to be done, how long it will take, what is needed, etc. Now is a good time to start for next Spring.

I'm sure the experts will have more to say and may even correct me on some things.

On another note I have pm'd you re the slabs if you are looking to get rid......;)

Dizzyblonde

We started our first vegetable patch this year too and we made a raised bed with mock railway sleepers (the real ones are poisonous so you couldn't use them for growing food). We filled it with topsoil and dug in some soil improver and it's taken off really well.

You should get some great tips on these sites:

http://www.gardenplansireland.com/forum/

http://www.allotment.org.uk/index.php

The Sweeper

alligator, what kind of soil are you on? Lack of drainage suggests you may be on clay. If the soil is sticky, claggy, sort of like the consistency of putty, you are most probably on clay and will need to do some work to prepare that for vegetable planting.

I'm going to base this on you having clay soil, and prepping garden beds for spring sowing.

If your whole garden is slabs, that's kind of cool. Just remove slabs to the size of the garden beds you want and leave the rest intact - they'll be useful for accessing the beds. You could then put timber sleepers or scaffolding planks around the edges of the beds, allowing you to raise the soil level some and improve drainage, but we'll come to that.

First, lift a couple of slabs. Next is to identify the type of soil you have. As I've said, if it's like putty when it's wet - sticky, claggy etc. - it could be clay. There can be a lot of nutrients in clay, but it's difficult to work. If your soil has had pavers over it for 12 years, then it'll be pretty dead - no nitrogen from plants rotting down into it, possibly not a lot of earth worms (nowt for them to nosh on!) There are different types of soil - clay, rich loam (often dark brown, friable, loose, smells rich and not sour), sandy and so on.

I'm presuming the fact that the previous owners paved the garden and that the drainage is bad points to it being clay - too hard to work, and wet, so they went for pavers instead. Still, it's not hard to improve your soil. Takes time and effort, but the results will happen.

Once you've established your kind of soil, test the PH value. You can buy a PH testing kit quite cheaply from a garden centre. They're very easy to use - normally it's "Mix soil with contents of bottle A, compare solution colour to this strip" or something similar. Most plants prefer a soil with a PH of 6 - 6.5. Finding out your soil PH is very useful, because some species prefer a far more acidic PH, closer to 4.5, and some vegetables prefer a more limey soil. (The mediterranean herbs, for instance, like a little lime in their soil).

Your soil may be quite alkaline if it's been 'dead' for a while, but mixing organic material through it will help that.

Once you've found your soil type and PH value, decide on the size of the beds you want. I would recommend you remove enough pavers that you have long, narrow beds where you can reach the centre easily from the sides. If your pavers are 12" square, maybe eight long by four wide would be great for a vegetable bed (five wide? four wide? you decide.)

Rotovators can be difficult to use - and if you're working in small spaces it may just be too hard. If it's too difficult to rotovate, use a garden fork. (Far, far easier to work clay with a fork than with a shovel.) First, dig the area over to a depth of the fork tines. Basically, dig the fork in to the depth of the tines, and lean your bodyweight on the handle. Clay usually lifts in an enormous lump. Turn the lump over and break it up with the fork tines.

Repeat ad nauseum until your back aches and your nose is running and you're sorry you started and you're sick of the sight of the great outdoors. Alternatively, continue until you've broken up the soil in the bed.

Then try working it over again a little deeper. The more work you put in, the better. If you have clay soil, you'll need two things for definite: gypsum (a calcium sulfate that helps break up the soil and stops clay soil from being claggy and sticking together) and mushroom compost (or other compost, but mushroom compost is spent compost that's been used to grow mushrooms - so there are still a lot of nutrients left in it).

Use up to 2kgs of gypsum per square metre and dig it right into your clay soil. (I'm pretty happy in assuming you're on clay here, but I can give different suggestions if you decide you're not.) Let's say you've worked the soil in the bed to a depth of about a foot. Work gypsum through. Now get in some mushroom compost.

Mushroom compost is available from garden centres, usually delivered by the ton, which is about a cubic metre. Another good substance would be blood and bone (or equivalent bone meal product - available again from garden centres in bags up to 25kgs). The compost is very rich and full of nutrients. How much to use depends on your soil PH and whether or not you've seen an earthworm so far.

You could use less - like 20% compost to 80% existing soil, and then build up some raised beds to the depth of maybe two sleepers or scaffold planks, and fill with topsoil, but I think I might go more - half and half compost to soil - and then raise the beds to the depth of a single plank or sleeper. You can always top the beds with two or three inches of topsoil (also bought in from the garden centre).

Blood and bone is an excellent fertiliser - distribution rates will be on the packet. They're usually quite vague, like a couple of fistfuls per square metre worked through the soil - it's great to add it and then leave the soil settle for a few weeks while it works its magic.

If you don't want to spend a bunch of cash on topsoil and loads of mushroom compost, try using just compost at a rate of 30% compost to existing soil, and add some blood and bone, and then plant a mixed crop of peas and beans. Legumes take nitrogen from the air and store it on nodules in their roots. As a result, they add nitrogen to the soil - and green leafy vegetables love nitrogen, which is why it's always a good idea to crop rotate cabbages and beans, for instance.

Anyway - you could try just a bit of compost and a bit of blood and bone, and then plant a thick crop of peas and beans. When they're about a foot high, dig them back into the soil. Yep, trample them and slice them with a shovel and fork them back through the soil. This gives your worms something (hopefully the addition of mushroom compost will have attracted these worms in the interim) to eat and will add much nitrogen to the soil.

Leave the beds for three or four weeks after digging in the green manure crop (green manure is how they refer to any crop grown to be dug in) and then plant what you like.

That's a lot of work, but it should give you vegetable beds that'll produce champion veggies after you sow in the spring.

Saying that, it's August, and if you start now you may still even get a first winter crop in depending what you can sow in your area through the cold months. There's less you can sow than in spring time, but it could be good to have a trial run with a couple of crops.

Generally it's good to let soil rest for at least two weeks after working it as I've described, before you sow something and especially leave it two to three weeks if you're going to plant out seedlings you've bought from a garden centre.

/end ramble

aligator_am

Thanks for all the replies guys, very much appreciated

Oh and a special thank you to minesajackdaniels for the great tips, I'll take everyone's suggestions on board and see how things work out, I'm hoping to report back to you all with good news.

Thanks again.
Al