Building a Mebourne Veggie Patch: I've trashed my soil!!

KEY LEARNINGS

Don't dig ciore mulch into your soil for use in a vegetable garden. It will draw nutrients out of the soil!

The best combination for mulch is Pea straw or (@@ I'll find this out in a bit)

DETAILS
There is a page on Mulch in the palm much is a classed as a woody type of mulch and below are some of its charactristics from wikipeadia Excerpt " Wood chips, are a byproduct of the pruning of trees by arborists, utilities and parks; they are used to dispose of bulky waste. Tree branches and large stems are rather coarse after chipping and tend to be used as a mulch at least three inches thick. The chips are used to conserve soil moisture, moderate soil temperature and suppress weed growth. Freshly produced chips from green recently living woody plants consumes nitrate as they are decay, this is often off set with a light application of a high-nitrate fertilizer.

Spring daffodils push through shredded wood mulch
Wood chips are most often used under trees and shrubs, when used around soft stemmed plants an unmulched zone is left around the plant stems to prevent stem rot or other possible diseases. They are often used to mulch trails, because they are readably produced with little additional cost outside of the normal disposal cost of tree maintenance."

HOW TO FIX IT
Replace the soil. I spoke to a nice chap at the CERES nursery about how I fix my problem. I have put approximately 180 litres of coir mulch on my garden so far. So I guess I have stuffed up approximately 250 litres of soil ouch!!

I will talk to Bullen art & Garden about dropping off a few meters cubed of high quality top soil (This will have to wait until approx. June as I am very busy this month)

DIARY ENTRY
Bugger it! My first proper disaster! I was looking at the way my garden is panning out and was concearned with the slow growing of my tomatoes and realised that all the areas where I have added palm mulch to the soil have done really badly (see below)