Dealing with problem spots

Improve your soil and work with what you’ve got, says Ruth

- Ruth Hayes

WE’VE all heard it said – and maybe even said it ourselves – ‘There’s a patch in the garden that I can do absolutely nothing with’.

No garden is perfect because only rarely will soil be naturally consistent across the whole area (you can even find different nutrient levels and pH values in the same plot), so there will always be places that are more tricky to cultivate than others.

It may be a patch of heavy clay that puddles in winter, a spot of dry shade where the moisture is leached out by tree roots or blocked by a shadowing wall, or a bed of poor soil that simply fails to flourish no matter what you chuck at it.

We have a couple of tricky patches in our garden, places with thin soil that gobble up sackloads of well-rotted organic matter (compost or manure) but never seem to become more fertile.