This autumn I’m going to mulch my beds like it’s the only gardening job that matters

It hasn’t been a flagship year for my veg patch. Between the soggy spring and high winds knocking over my support structures, 2024 has been a struggle. Never did I think I’d see a summer where I didn’t tire of courgettes or fill my freezer with green beans. And while I’d love to blame the weather for my catalogue of failures, I have myself to blame for making one cardinal mistake.

This time last year, I failed to do the one thing a no-dig grower is duty bound to do: I didn’t mulch my beds with enough compost. Over winter, it rained and rained, and without the protection and nourishment of a thick layer of compost, the clay soil became increasingly waterlogged and compacted, leaving me trying to grow crops in virtually impenetrable soil this season. The winter squash suffered the most, getting covered in mildew far earlier than usual and setting only a few fruit as a result.

So this autumn, once the summer crops were out of the ground, I made a plan to start mulching like it’s the only gardening job that matters. Now’s the time to do it, while the soil is still warm and there’s some moisture in the ground (mulches maintain the prevailing soil condition, so avoid mulching when it’s dry or very cold). I’ll be spreading 3-4cm of compost on all my veg beds – annual and perennial – to improve the soil’s structure, which will mean better water retention and less waterlogging, as well as feeding the soil life.

Alongside this, I’m reverting to an annual practice that is a central tenet of growing on an organic-certified site: green manures. Green manures form part of a traditional crop rotation and involve deploying beneficial plants as a way of resting and regenerating the soil.

Field beans can be sown into November (depending on how cold it gets where you are), should germinate within a couple of weeks and are hardy enough to overwinter. They’re good for heavy soils, breaking them up and leaving them more friable by spring. They also act as a nitrogen fixer, taking nitrogen from the air and, with the help of beneficial bacteria, capturing it in their roots. At the end of their life cycle they decompose, releasing said nitrogen into the soil to fuel the leafy growth of the plants that follow them.

The most common way of managing green manures is to dig them into the soil before they develop seeds (and potentially become a self-seeding weedy problem). However, as a no-dig practitioner, I’m planning to chop them off at ground level and cover them with more compost to encourage the green material to decompose, or to take it and add it to my compost bin. Either way, I’m certain these plants will improve the sorry state of the soil in my garden.