Our gardening guru for the 9th session of lockdown gardening this week was Bob Bilson from Strathkinness Community Garden, with help from Helena Simmons, Ninewells Community Garden and Andrea Roach, Yellow Wellies Garden. Bob talked about soil types and simple tests on how to find out your own, using weeds to ‘test’ your soils and how different forms of mulching can keep your soil healthy and productive.
Resources:
- Easy home tests for your soil structure:
- Permaculture soil testing handbook
- Hutton Institute
- Check your soil app (only for iphones) – Soil Information for Scottish Soils
- Scottish soils website
- Source of sterile/non-weedy Comfrey Bocking 14 – gardenorganic.org.uk
- Importance of soil and keeping it healthy – PLANT and Grow Observatory projec0t (lots of good videos about soil and climate etc. and links to resources)
Our next two workshops on Food Forest in Your Backyard and Gardening for Wildlife are ready for booking on Eventbrite here. Recordings and notes from previous workshops can be found on PLANT website.
This workshop series is an informal collaboration between a number of local community food growers in response to increased demand for growing advice under covid-15 lockdown, including Edible Campus (Transition University St Andrews), Yellow Wellies Gardening, Strathkinness Community Garden, Ninewells Community Garden, PLANT’s Tayport Community Garden. We would welcome any other contributors, please get in touch with Kaska on blog@tayportgarden.org.
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