Quick Overview
The easy way to grow soil - build a compost heap. Weeds are as much part of your harvest as anything else you grow, so put them to use. Add vegetable and plant waste from the allotment, garden and kitchen. It doesn't need to be a lot of work. However, a little effort will produce better results - and there are just a couple of wise precautions to take.
Look around your allotment site - when weeds (and the soil attached to their roots) are removed entirely from a plot, however it's done, then the beds start to disappear. I know plots where the bed level has sunk 3-4 inches below path level - all that beautiful, rich, fertile soil stripped off and dumped somewhere.
Turning the weeds and waste into compost puts all that soil back into your beds - which builds up your soil with health structure and nutrients. My beds are at least 4-6 inches higher than my paths.
I run two or three cold (slow) heaps, which produce compost in 9 months to a year. A cover will keep moisture in and the rain out. By accident, one of my heaps came to be covered in these nasturtiums - looked stunning in full flower, and not a weed growing from the heap.
- Some old books recommend growing Tagetes minuta (Giant Marigold) to put on the compost heap; it is also supposed to kill eel worm, wipe out ground elder, couch grass and bindweed. That's something worth trying - nothing lost, beyond the cost of a packet of seed.
Best of all, when the November cold snap killed the nasturtiums, I simply peeled back the stalks, and found the best compost I have had from any of my heaps. Coincidence? Who cares - I now sow nasturtiums deliberately on all my heaps.
- A lot of the old guys think I'm daft - cold heaps don't kill weed seeds, so as soon as I spread all that lovely compost on a bed, I know I'm sowing weeds. So what? My beds aren't sterile, and I have to use the hoe on the weeds already there. Adding a few seeds makes no extra work at all.
- If you have the time and inclination, try running a "hot heap", which will produce compost much more quickly - do it really well, and you could have compost in a month. Very satisfying and easy - especially if you are adding a lot of kitchen waste.