I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the Lakeland Fells when I was growing up. It’s a place of stunning natural beauty and treacherous landscapes. Craggy mountain ranges are interrupted by smooth glassy lakes, and rocks are a prominent feature of every field and path. Sheep, resilient in the wild weather, litter the rough hillsides where little else can be farmed. Near Dalefoot Farm, in the Eden Valley there are lush green fields, laced with a sprawling network of drystone walls.
As you drive down the windswept road to Dalefoot farm, the countryside, in hues of grey, purple and orange, sprawls out in front of you. The farm buildings with their grey stone nestled into the hills. As the seasons change so too does the landscape. Mottled green, pricked with wildflowers gives way to rich hues of orange and gold in September, only to be intermittently dusted with snow through winter.
It's here in this wild and beautiful place that Dalefoot’s Lakeland Gold starts its life. Like all composts, it starts its life as a collection of ingredients. One of these ingredients is bracken. In its composted form, Bracken is light and strong. It’s rich in a polymer called lignin which gives woody bark, tree trunks and branches their strength. When added to the soil as a mulch, it helps to add structure, creating better aeration and better water infiltration. If you’re lucky enough to be gardening on heavy clay like me, this makes a huge difference. Where clay tends to dry out and crack in the summer, and then turn to a sticky, slippery gloop in the winter, adding a lignin-rich compost as a mulch helps improve the soil structure and increase the organic matter content. The result is that the soil doesn’t dry out so quickly, is able to absorb more water, and doesn’t become sticky and slippery. Over time, with regular applications, clay soil will become highly fertile and much easier to plant into in all the seasons.
What I really love about Bracken being an ingredient in Lakeland Gold is that it provides a sustainable form of conservation in the Lake District where it is harvested. Bracken is an invasive plant, and whilst it can't spread to your garden through the compost, it can cause chaos in the fields where it spreads easily. It’s tall, thick foliage chokes the natural flora, starving it of sunlight and preventing the natural biodiversity from thriving. By using this bullish plant as an ingredient in their composts, Dalefoot can offer a sustainable solution for managing it. They cut the bracken and harvest it for use in their composts. This offers fairly paid work for skilled locals where work is scarce and conservation that does not depend on potentially unreliable grants or charity work.
When I first visited Dalefoot Farm, I was struck by how much care and attention goes into blending and checking the composts. Co-founder Simon Bland is never without dirt under his fingernails from meticulously checking and handling the compost before it is bagged. It seems labour-intensive, but for Simon, it’s a true labour of love.
After carefully being bagged up, Lakeland Gold and the other peat-free composts are shipped across the country to their new homes to help nourish gardens and their owners.
This is where the journey of Lakeland Gold starts to get really interesting. Many people think carefully about what they eat, ensuring that they eat a well-balanced, nutrient-rich diet (with the occasional treat, of course!). We generally assume that if we eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, our diet will be rich in nutrients and antioxidants, which will be good for us. However, in order for our food to be rich in nutrients, the soil in which it is grown must also be full of nutrients. As gardeners, we are acutely aware of the difference healthy soil makes to our ability to grow healthy plants. But we don’t often think about the effect that consumption of these plants has on us. Some studies have shown crops grown in healthy no-dig soils to be up to four times as nutrient-dense as the same crop grown in an ordinary organic farm. When compared with non-organic and intensive farming, the results are even less favourable. This means that when we grow our own food in healthy soil, the resulting food is richer in nutrients. Foods that contain more nutrients will also have a fuller and more interesting taste. This is why we allotmenteers and kitchen gardeners have such discerning taste, and can often be heard telling people how tasty our homegrown tomatoes are compared to the shop-bought ones. We are actually right.
Using a good quality mulch such as Lakeland Gold can improve soil health over time, add nutrients and unlock the nutrient potential of your soils. In the case of clay soils, what they are usually lacking is aeration. Clay particles are like tiny disks, and as such, they can lay on top of one another, producing a very dense structure. This is one of the reasons that clay is such a popular crafting and building material.
When you add good quality organic compost to the surface of clay soil it feeds the life in the soil. Things like earthworms come up to the surface to feed and pull the organic matter back down with them. Smaller organisms feed on the organic matter and turn it into sticky glues, helping to create aggregates in the soil. Aggregates, more commonly called peds, are small lumps of soil particles and organic matter. When these aggregates are formed, they open spaces in the soil called pores and these spaces hold air. When it rains, water filters through the pores, clinging to aggregates like tiny sponges on the way down, and creates a vacuum, pulling air down into the soil.
The result is that the soil is lighter, holds more water, has better drainage, and is full of air. This is a perfect environment for the soil organisms to live, and those organisms help release nutrients to our plants.
Being a rich, woody mulch, Lakeland Gold is more hard-wearing on our vegetable beds. It takes more time and more interactions with soil organisms to break it down, which means that it is incredibly powerful at adding structure to the soil.
Its soft, light texture makes it easy to mulch with, and its burnished gold tones lend an autumnal feel to your garden beds. It’s powerful ability to breakdown clay and invigorate hard soils makes it a great friend to many gardeners. And it goes on doing good in the world throughout its journey from fell to fork.
Becky
About Me:
Becky is a garden writer with a background in ecology and botany. She has a keen knowledge of soil and spends the time outside her garden speaking and writing about natural gardening and soil ecology. Becky has a podcast called The Seed Pod and is active on social media as Sow Much More. If you want to follow her journey, follow @Sow_Much_More on Instagram or Sow Much More on Facebook.