Kem Ormond’s vegetable garden: Feed your soil with the chop-and-drop method

Now is the time to get your garden soil ready in preparation for warmer weather. Photo / 123rf

Kem Ormond is a features writer for NZME community newspapers and The Country. She’s also a keen gardener. This week, she talks about the chop-and-drop method of feeding your soil all year round.

OPINION

This week I harvested some broccoli, a small cauliflower, spring onions and miners’ lettuce and picked some beautiful fresh coriander and parsley.

On my window area in my kitchen, I have micro herbs that I have been continually picking.

I also have beautiful leaves on my kaffir lime tree to flavour my rice but my crowning glory is that in the next week or two, I will be digging my early potatoes, and my next crop of potatoes is up and romping away.

I must admit I can’t take all the glory for the potatoes, which goes to the potato and beetroot fanatic in my household.

Getting no frost where I live also enables the early potatoes to be planted a lot earlier than in many places.

There is nothing more satisfying than digging your own new potatoes, and then eating them smothered in butter, a good grind of salt and pepper and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.

I could eat a plate of potatoes and nothing else – if I were allowed to!

Even if you only have a small vegetable garden, do try growing your own potatoes, you won’t regret it.

An excellent choice is Swift or Rocket for early potatoes and then the following crop plant Agria or Nadine.

Nourish your soil

Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when composting. Photo / 123rf

While planting your crops is the easy part, if you want success, you have to feed that soil and as an added advantage, if you have not already done it, raise your vegetable beds.

They do not need to be fancy raised beds with wooden sides etc, you just need to lift the height of your bed by using your own compost, cover crops and some soil.

This will help raise the temperature of your garden beds and improve the growth of your plants.

In my vegetable garden, the chop-and-drop method has been used and for the last 12-14 years; no outside material has been brought in to feed the soil.

It has all been from compost made on the property and by using the chop-and-drop method.

Cover crops are grown and then dug into the soil and all organic material, weeds, lawn clippings, leftover vegetables, stalks from vegetable plants etc are left on the top of the soil to die and then dug in.

The soil is rich and fertile.

I have had other vegetable gardens in the past where I have removed every weed and just put them into the compost and, over time, the soil compacted through being baked by the sun, although it didn’t produce good vegetables.

The soil I now have and the vegetables I now produce are far superior.

Plus, I have got over my phobia of having a few piles of green matter rotting away on top of my vegetable beds – it did take a while but now is second nature.

This is how the whole garden is treated, flower beds and all.

After a couple of days, the chopped vegetation just gets buried under the lush plants to compost away at its leisure.

Any large vegetation, such as the remains of fully grown tomato plants etc, are better chopped up before being added to the pile to rot.

If it’s harder wood, I still chop and will put this into my compost boxes that I know will take longer to decompose.

I have a separate food compost bin for any food waste as this composts down quicker. I then add it to the garden.

I do not have a worm farm, but I have friends who do and the vegies do enjoy the worm tea that is produced.

So, with the warmer weather looming, get your soil well-fed, because in a few weeks, you will want it to be ready for planting out those summer vegetables.

Happy gardening!