It’s one of those things nobody tells you about gardening before you start. It’s easy to imagine digging soft, earthy soil and planting happy crops in the ground with ease. In reality, garden soil is often hard, brittle and tightly compacted, making it difficult to even get a shovel in.
What’s more, soil can be surprisingly deficient in nutrients, especially if your garden has weeds growing across flowerbeds, which suck important vitamins out of the ground. But garden experts are backing a totally organic method to boost the condition and quality of your soil: planting mustard.
Mustard has apparently been used by gardeners for centuries as a way of improving soil, blocking weeds and even repelling pests, long before commercial fertilisers and composts were readily available in garden centres.
Not only does it boost your soil, but it also produces delicious, edible plants in under 60 days too.
Apparently, the mustard trick is even used by vineyards to protect valuable wine grape soil in between harvests.
Fine Gardening says: “If you’ve ever travelled to California’s wine country in early spring, you may have seen the vineyards awash in yellow flowers. Those are mustard plants, the winemaker’s friend. Many vineyard owners plant mustard deliberately as a cover crop or let field mustard (Brassica kaber) run rampant. When plowed back into the soil, the plants act as a green manure and release nitrogen. Mustard also repels some insects (the seeds are that hot) and attracts syrphid flies, beneficial predators that attack vine-chewing insects.
“Mustard is blissfully free of insect and disease problems, and larger critters don’t seem to like it much either. The hotter and drier the weather, though, the faster the plants go to seed — 30 to 60 days, depending on the variety and the climate.”
Garden Organic backs this up, although with the caveat that in very hot conditions it can sometimes struggle a bit. Most of the time, the British summer isn’t going to stay hot enough for long enough for this to be a major concern, though.
It says: “Mustard will grow very quickly in fertile soil, making it excellent for suppressing weeds and stopping nutrients leaching from the soil between harvests in warmer months. However, it can struggle in very hot weather.”