Gardener's Guide to Soil by Susie Holmes
Author:Susie Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crowood Press
Beech leaves are particularly good for making leaf mould within a year, as are oak, hornbeam, cherry, poplar and willow. Tougher leaves, such as horse chestnut and sycamore, need to be chopped with a shredder or mower first and can take eighteen months to two years to break down properly.
Spent Mushroom Compost
There are fewer mushroom growers in the UK than there used to be, but it is possible to buy mushroom compost from garden centres or bulk suppliers and it is a good source of organic matter when used as either a soil improver or a mulch. It is a mixture of manure and mushroom casing (often peat) with added lime so is quite alkaline (high in pH) and therefore not suitable for use around acid-loving plants. It also has a high nutrient content so needs to be well mixed with soil around sensitive and young plants.
Mushroom compost is particularly useful for vegetable beds and allotments because maintaining a good soil pH is important to help reduce club root disease in crops like cabbage and kale.
Digestate Fibre
There are now many anaerobic digestion units around the UK; these are used to digest organic materials to produce methane gas, which is then used to make electricity. They work a bit like a huge cowâs stomach â bacteria break down the organic material (maize, straw, grass, vegetable waste and so on) and produce methane in the absence of oxygen (hence âanaerobicâ). Some crops are grown specifically to feed the digesters as a way of producing renewable energy.
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