I am a little later than I'd hoped in getting the veg patch started. The main cause of the delay was my compost; it just wasn't ready to be dug in at the start of spring. Almost a year since I acquired my compost bin it is only half full, and the process has barely begun. Now that the weather is warm again the rotting matter that you could call proto-compost is starting to look distinctly slimy and is smelling a bit. It would seem I have made the classic mistake of the first-time composter: I haven't been putting enough "browns" in.

Apparently, one should aim for one part "green" to thirty parts "brown", which very broadly speaking means that I should be putting in thirty times as much dead stuff from the garden as I do kitchen waste. It's tricky to come up with that as we don't get many dead leaves and so on in our garden. The house was previously a holiday home and the garden has clearly been designed to be very low-maintenance, so it produces little waste. There is currently a patch of brown dead plants on one of the flower beds but I am loathe to take this up as I think it acts a mulch and is currently protecting this year's young plants in that bed. I have read that straw is a good souce of browns. I could buy some but I would prefer to recycle as much as I can rather than buying in materials for the heap. I imagine that once the vegetable garden is up and running I will have more suitable waste.

The upshot of this is that I am unlikely to have home-made compost before next spring, so I had to get this year's from a garden centre. I had to put off that a bit longer than I wanted to as the poor car had a problem with it's suspension and I didn't want to overburden it with heavy sacks of compost until it was fixed. So, on Thursday night with the help of the Carnivore, I finally dug three sacks of organic compost into the vegetable patch.

Before the compost went in I took a soil sample for a pH test. It looks like the soil is slightly acidic, which is brilliant news as this suits the widest range of vegetables. However, I don't have complete confidence in this result. Firstly, the test instructions weren't terribly helpful. They told me to empty a capsule of powder into the test tube that came with the test then add soil up to the first line on the tube. There was one problem with this: the powder itself filled the tube to the first line. I put what seemed a sensible amount of soil in, but I don't know whether the test is accurate with the wrong amount of soil. Second, our tap water is itself slightly acidic, with a pH of 6.6. (It is a private water supply which we have to have tested now and then. The acidity comes from the peat which the water drains through). This will have affected the test but I'm not sure how much. For a start, the key to the test does not show actual pH values, only "alkaline", "neutral", "acid" and "very acid".

Still, I think it is fairly reasonable to assume that the soil does not fall into the "alkaline" or "very acid" ranges. This is just as well because according to my main reference, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith, adding lime or ashes to alter the soil's pH is best carried out in Autumn, and in any case should be done three weeks before planting to allow the change to take effect.

So, it's time to cross my fingers and hope that I've put in enough compost and the pH is alright, and that the seeds I am about to plant grow into healthy veggies!