Gardeners working with soil that needs extra care can sow legumes including vetch, field beans and forage peas to improve it, gardening writer Claire Ratinon says.
Writing in the Guardian, Ratinon says legumes take nitrogen from the air and capture it in their bodies with the help of bacteria, releasing it later for use by future plants. She describes them as an effective ally for organic growers whose soil needs attention.
Ratinon says she gardens on heavy clay in a vegetable patch on a hill, where the ground drops about a metre from one side of the site to the other. She says clay soil is nutrient dense, but those nutrients are more difficult for gardeners to access for their crops than with other soil types.
Her usual approach of adding a mulch of compost or well-rotted manure, which insects then incorporate into the earth, has been difficult at the site, she says. Layers of compost spread over the past year were either washed away or poorly mixed into deeper soil, a problem she attributes to the slope and to ground that becomes sodden in wet winters and solid in summer heatwaves.
According to Ratinon, vetch, also known as winter tares, along with field beans and forage peas have an ideal sowing time of September, although she expects October to be fine in milder spots. Sown now, she says, the plants will push their roots deep into the soil over the coming months.
Come spring, before the plants have flowered and while their stems are still soft, they can be cut down at the base, she writes. Gardeners who dig can incorporate them into the soil; those who do not, as is her preference, can chop them into pieces and lay them as a surface mulch or leave them in the compost to rot down.
Either way, Ratinon says, the root systems decompose in the ground where they are of most benefit, improving the soil’s structure and its capacity to retain water as well as dispensing with any excess.
She notes the trade-off: her vegetable beds will not be planted with her favourite winter-ready or overwintering crops, but she expects the soil to be in a much better state to work with next spring.
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