Growing Daffodils, Soil

Soil Conditioner

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Hi Bob
I assume that your ground is very acid and that’s why you do not want to add any more peat, if the peat suits your methods why not continue with the peat and adjust the PH with either ground limestone or better still calcified seaweed as most daffodils like the PH about 6.00 to 6.5 but some of the species and triandrus like it a little more acid.
When adding bark or coir I worry about what it does to the nitrogen content of the soil because it needs nitrogen to break it down. When I was growing chrysanthemums I once had a problem with the nutritan levels on my plot with an excess of potash caused by years of applying farm yard manure.  To overcome the problem for the first year I stopped adding manure and the chrysanthemums had a diet of nitrogen and very little superphosphate which corrected most of the imbalance in the soil but I had to find an alternative to manure to prevent the nutritional imbalance happening again. My answer to the problem was beech leaves, these were used in potting composts for years before peat and they are wonderful for drainage and during their breaking down stages they do not take anything out of the soil.  They add hummus to the plot in two ways, first the leaf texture which breaks down leaving the veins of the leaf which then continue to break down at a much slower rate, which assists drainage and eventually turns into humus.
Plus the other advantage is that it is free if you are prepared to sweep up the leaves, or I am sure that there is enough in the wild (if you are allowed to collect it) and if it has been left for some time it will be turning into good soil conditioner. It worked for me and solved my problems and after 6 years of putting about a 4″ layer on the top of the plot every year and rotovating it into the top 10″ my soil is still in top condition some 10 years later and the daffodils are thriving, but I did have 20 years of the same application of manure which must of helped, before I used the leaves.
Just a little food for thought!
Regards
Roger Braithwaite

 

1 comment for “Soil Conditioner”

  1. I guess it pays to  b e poor. When I was a kid, my dad, an avid but frequently broke gardner, placed an ad in the paper saying, “If you have your leaves all bagged up without trash and other foreign matter, I will haul them away for free.”

    The response was overwhelming – every night he’d bring a pickup load home that he’d picked up on the way home from work. We had a MOUNTAIN of bagged leaves. The leaves wound up covering our quarter acre garden two feet deep, every flower bed, raspberry patch, strawberry bed, and fruit tree was mulched, and the remainder, still bagged, were piled around the foundation of our house as winter insulation. When spring came around, the garden was plowed under, and the remaining bags were opened and dumped onto the garden as we planted for summer mulch.
    Dad ran that ad three years in a row with great success – and for years after, the same people would call us to let us know we could come get their leaves and grass clippings without us even running the ad.
    Me? I snag bagged leaves from my bank – the gardener even helps me load them into the front and back of my station wagon – at other times I’ve actually stopped by people who are raking leaves and stacking the bags on the curb in ront of their house, they’re glad that I take the things off their hands because it costs extra for the trash men to haul them off! Hey, treasure is where you find it!
    Chris, semi-pro scrounge and scavenger

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