It’s been just over a year that I completed Elaine Ingham’s Life in the Soil classes. It seems a good time to take stock, as we go into the colder part of the year when practical fieldwork winds down. So what have I learned?

There is certainly promise in the end results – very visibly in the case of the beans, and noticeably in the improved taste and productivity of the tomatoes. We only have one polytunnel for the tomatoes in 2016, but we got almost as much yield this year from this one than from two polytunnels of tomatoes [ref]We have three polytunnels, all of the same size and colocated[/ref] in 2015.
I know of no way of quantitatively analysing taste, but several of our CSA members observed the much better flavour of our tomatoes compared with shop bought ones. However, one other thing we changed across the years was have a dedicated CSA member Ann look after the tomatoes, pinching out all the offshoots and training the stems along the frames. Because we could not afford a control plot with the tomatoes, the almost doubling of yield could be the result of her extra care and attention to detail, or a combination of the her work assisted by the compost extract.
The compost extract was used in the polytunnel with the tomatoes in July 2015 and some of what was left over was also used in polytunnel 1 which was where the beans were planted, with the ribbon tied to the frame to show the extent of the coverage, the left behind compost after extraction also went into the tomatoes in polytunnel 2.

Not every attempt showed success – last year we tried some outdoor tests on defined plots in the sweetcorn crop. This crop was lost to the initially wet and dull start to 2015 and not enough manpower for weeding. I felt there was some difference in one of the plots, but not enough to make a clear picture and not enough to redeem the crop.
Continue reading “What I learned over a year of growing with Soil Biology”