Controversial diet matters.

[Ricard with an H]

So what you are saying and RHS have either omitted to say or more likely I haven't understood is that relying on composted waste is a gamble but you need to use it.

Sounds like I had a few lucky years Geoff, so you add granular or powdered fertilizer like FBB or bone meal on top of the composted garden waste ? Surely you must have built up some experience on what to use because some crops are more greedy that others and some just don't want nitrogen.

Take the spuds I just planted, I dug in four bags of farmyard manure because in that particular bed the soil is very dry, can I disregard any nutrient value and scatter fertilizer mixed for root crops ?

This is all beginning to sound like (As the yanks say) "A crap shoot".

This what I just bought.

Base Fertiliser Blended Pro Grower
15-9-20+9.5%So3+1.8%MgO+Trace Elements

[tigerburnie]

My wife found a comment on her phone from a scientist working up in Scotland to do with tattie growing, seems the farmers are burying them too deep and putting too much nitrogen on the fields to try and increase crops.
Reference the amount of BFB or Growmore used in my garden, I am using about half of one of those big buckets you get a year and not all at once, I also top dress roses and pots with flowers in as well. My 3 raised beds and the "rabbit proof" bit are probably around half a lottie plot in size though.

[Geoff]

Don't quite understand that analysis but it looks like an expensive tomato fertiliser.
I have a rather fiddly approach to fertiliser and I wouldn't really recommend it to anybody else. I have in stock lime, Growmore, superphosphate, sulphate of potash, fish blood bone, bonemeal and seaweed meal. I make quite a lot of compost based on grass mowings with garden and kitchen waste, shredded paper, torn up cardboard and comfrey. I have one trailer load of manure a year much of which is used for mulching soft fruit but some gets dug in as well. I dig the greenhouse and tunnel beds every year and probably just over half the vegetable beds; I don't dig for onions, roots, brassicas or cut flowers (except the dahlias and sweet peas). I juggle the fertilisers according to what I am growing; some get extra potash or extra phosphate or both (really less nitrogen than extra the others if you follow), the nitrogen is supplied by Growmore for quicker crops or a mixture of Growmore and organics for slower crops. Every now and then I give a bed some seaweed meal, I might be being conned but it is supposed to top up the trace elements.
As I said, I wouldn't really suggest you try this, stick to various levels of Growmore and you won't go wrong. After all the season is more influential than what we do that is why advice is so varied, you try something and it works because everything else was favourable so that becomes your routine and the advice you pass on.

[oldherbaceous]

Unless you have your soil tested each year, no one really knows exactly what your soil needs for each crop....so i work on the simplest of basis that, every time I remove a crop, i try and add something back to the soil. This could be in the form of farmyard manure, horse manure, homemade compost, or an organic fertilizer of some sort. I do feed hungry plants, like Cauliflowers, Celeriac and the like, with a liquid feed, just to give them a boost if I think they need it.

[Ricard with an H]

Thanks OH, I'm getting it now and thanks to all of you for persevering in this matter.

A lot of new gardeners and some that have been gardening for years still don't get it but I was on the case from the beginning even though I was mostly changing things, seems like changing things is close to what you are all doing.

Carrot seeds are in and the covers are over, I just have to remember to put slug pellets down before the seedlings push through or I'll loose them all

[robo]

There is a few of us on the allotment that have agreed we will not use horse muck anymore , the allotment has a bad case of horses tails we just can't eradicate them after talking to members of another allotment who have banned horse manure for the amount of weeds it brings in some of us are doing likewise

[Monika]

Sorry to be late with my answer, Richard: we use Vitax Potato Fertiliser with NPK 4 : 2.5 : 8 and I also use it for carrots and celeriac. Because we don't grow very much nowadays, a 1kg box lasts us two seasons.

[Geoff]

I guess that might have been tongue in cheek but no relationship between horsetails and horse muck other than one coming from under the other. Other weeds from horse muck would happen if they were fed good meadow hay and it wasn't stacked so it got really hot.

[tigerburnie]

I always thought that horse muck was weed free because of the heat, but we don't now use it on edibles as the feed fed to the horses could pass into our food chain and some of it's not nice......allegedly.

[Ricard with an H]

Im finding this nothing short of bizarre and though I'm not judging others views and reasonings there are many more avoidable items of crap that get into soil than animal evacuations, even our own evacuations, bodies even, will be dealt with by what lives in healthy soil.

At some point during my apprenticeship to you lot I almost had to abandon my use of cow muck because it could have contained the selective herbicide used on the surrounding fields by our farmer and though he hadn't used (he claimed) that particular banned substance it was agreed that after a years composting the compost would be safe to use.

If you want to be total about weed control you'll have to garden in polytunnels, cook your soil to destroy the weed bank (destroying beneficial bugs and micro things) and only use chemical fertilizer.

Silent spring by Rachel Carson may change your minds.

[Geoff]

Pot noodles to horse muck - what a thread!
Game changing book, I read it soon after publication. Lost my copy, shared a house with somebody studying chemistry and he read it and I think kept it, he eventually went into an environmental job and I think it had an influence.
I live with weeds even in the polytunnel, they just get recycled through the compost heaps.

[robo]

I'm not talking about a few weeds that can be pulled out in a few minutes ,I recently dug my early spuds up six rows roughly twelve spuds per row ,half way through I had a barrow full and over two feet height pilled on the top this is after spending most of spring going round singing weeds with a gas gun

[Ricard with an H]

Pot noodles to horse muck - what a thread!
.

Brilliant Eh ? I often won't start a thread thinking it's too trivial but these wide-ranging discussions invite everyone in though it's competition for OH's 'Anything goes threads'


Sorry OH.

I still have Silent Spring, I was 35 when I bought it. I was already a vegetarian (Not the soapbox type) and being influenced by people who thought way outside what was normal at the time. Now I worry about plastic residue in my fish and in the soil, I hate throwing stuff away and get into arguments with those who constantly replace stuff and send their replaced stuff to land-fill. I have a lot of 'Stuff' stacking up, I feel sorry for those who have to get rid of it all when go though.

Marketing people say we have to change our bed mattresses every 5 to 8 years regardless of how often they were used and offered a ten year guarantee with the latest one we bought to replace a perfectly good clean hardly used one, I can't move in the blue-room for mattresses because I won't send it to the tip.

Plastic bags, I wash them until they are very scruffy then burn them polluting the very clean atmosphere I purposely chose to live in.

[retropants]

Richard, regarding the matresses, have you tried a local freecycle or trashnothing page? matresses are always needed by folk on these pages, I re-homed a good one that way. I can't bear the thought of them piling up in landfil....although inevitable in the end I suppose. Off to look up silent spring.....

[Ricard with an H]

Thanks Emma, I had assumed no one would want a second hand mattress. This mattress is pristine, it's a spare room mattress rotated with mattress on a bed that's only used at weekends. Not caved in.

Don't read a Silent Spring if you have a 'Dark clouds period' I have re-read it a number of times, it gets to me more each time. Rachel Carson had a very depressing vision of the future.

We stopped using anti bacterial sprays, instead I mix lemon myrtle oil with water to make a spray. Lemon myrtle is a very effective anti bacterial and smells better than garlic. Mix it into the soap you make.