Our soil is heavy clay, but slowly becoming a lovely rich dark substance thanks to the massive quantities of horse manure and home-made compost we've added to the uninspiring sticky blue and yellow subsoil with which we started. My mantra is never walk on the ground; clay soils can suffer with compaction making drainage a problem and increasing the workload for the soil fauna and roots trying to make their way through the ground. To help with this, the beds were constructed a metre and a half across and six metres long with half metre grass paths running between them. I reckoned the width was narrow enough for me to reach to the middle without stepping on the surface, which it was until rheumatoid disease came along and made my body weak painful and inflexible, and the length was short enough to stop me just hopping across rather than walking around. I have a large square of plywood for when I must stand in the middle for planting or whatever, to spread my weight.
