Cream-crackered lime

Lines of grey powdered lime on rough pasture field

Powdered lime is heavier than it looks 😅

In a sweltering 12°C of this mildest of winters, I’ve started spreading powdered lime in the Ornamental Forest Garden. Phew.

There’s a metric tonne of powdered lime in the Dutch Barn that needs to make way for the annual thinning of the 2 acre woodland. This is our main source of wood for the woodburner until the coppice starts producing in a few years time, so we need all the space we can get.

We had our soil tested at the local farmers coop, and it’s about 5.5pH, so fairly acid by the reckoning of the RHS. Sprinkling powdered lime (quarried limestone that has been ground) is the easiest way to balance the acidity and you can buy it by the trailer-load from a local quarry.

But crikey, isn’t that powdered lime ever so heavy, particularly when you have to wheelbarrow it up a track and across a bumpy field. And the weather, well, a muggy 12°C, meant I ended up working in my T-shirt. In December. Ridiculous. I was proper cream-crackered.