In March Juliet Sargeant inspired, informed and entertained the EAGG audience with her talk on ‘Start with Soil.’ Juliet is a Chelsea Gold-winning garden designer, a regular panellist on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time and runs a gardening school in Sussex. She challenged us to take our soil seriously, explaining its structure and how we can improve it by planting and adopting ‘no-dig’ techniques, by applying organic matter, mulches and cover crops to the soil surface, and encouraging biodiversity.
Surprisingly, in a talk about the importance of soil, Juliet suggested that many plants can grow happily without any soil at all! She listed air plants, including orchids, which have evolved to grow on another larger plant; plants, notably strawberries, which are raised in a hydroponic system so their roots are in water which provides all the nutrients needed without using soil as a delivery medium; and an increasingly popular concept – rubble and sand gardens where drought-tolerant plants appreciate the free-draining poor soils.
Juliet is a strong advocate of mulching and composting, and her newly-published book ‘Start with Soil’ devotes twenty pages to the subject. She has advice on how to make your own compost, she asses commercial varieties, and even describes how to make a wormery.
No-dig gardening is a resurgence of an old method of gardening which Juliet says makes ‘lazy’ gardeners (like her) happy. It involves avoiding soil upheaval by layering organic matter on top of undisturbed soil. Rain gardens and Hugelkultur are other lesser-known methods of gardening which Juliet suggests for the adventurous.
In her book Juliet lists a variety of plants which she recommends as soil-savers, including the familiar potato as a clay-buster, red clover for a cover crop and nitrogen fixer and Bergenia, a soil-stabiliser.
Juliet’s talk was packed full of little-know facts and advice on how to make our gardens flourish by starting with the basic – soil.
‘Start with Soil’ by Juliet Sargeant, published by Frances Lincoln.