Kitchen Garden Forum

What's the best growing medium to use in a trug - mainly to be used for growing quick veg, spring onions, french beans, etc. John Innes no 2?

What does everything think?

Dear Diane, i would use half potting compost and half John Innes No2, it just helps to keep the the mixture a little more open.

Excellent - thank you very much.

Hi Diane

Few days late in replying to this one, sorry.

When you say 'Trugs' are you referring to items similar to the light blue items pictured here which are often referred to as Trugs in shops these days ?



If so the first thing I had to do was drill decent size holes for drainage. In the size tubs shown I drilled 6 x 18mm holes in the base of each.
Then filled with a 50/50 mixture of shop purchased multi purpose and home made compost.

We have about a dozen of these, now used mainly for strawberries but successfully used in the past for spring onions, beetroot, carrots, tomato and lettuce.

Be warned they do dry out quick and need frequent watering

Hope that helps

Excellent crop in your blue containers. Didn't know they were trugs too. What I meant was - the V shaped horse trough looking things, on legs. But the growing principles are the same and thank you for both your answers.

Yes I would have thought a generous proportion of John Innes in the mixture to prevent it drying out. As a matter of experiment, if you have excellent garden loam from your garden or allotment without too many weed seeds in it I would also be tempted to mix some of that in if you want a more permanent growing medium. With the wooden framed V shaped horse trugs I would have thought that using only compost from the average garden centre bags of stuff you buy would mean that the nutrition will very quickly be exhausted and would have to be completely replaced every growing season, as well as needing frequent watering.

Are you planning to replace all the compost every year? As a matter of interest I treat my patio pots and containers as mini compost heaps every autumn once they're emptied of plants , digging in lawn clippings, dead leaves and various items from my kitchen crock pot. They rot down beautifully over winter and enable me to keep the same compost in them going for ages

Even though I grow in pots, mostly clay pots, and as a flower display together with things that have to go in pots like mint I think that growing in pot's has to be a skill on it's own and getting the right mix is very important. I found that when you do get the right mix so the medium doesn't go sour and compacted from water draining through then you have a situation where constant watering-vigil is necessary.

Last year I bought a gadget you poke into the growing medium to tell you about moisture levels, for me it's a good idea but it's like leading a horse to water.

Everything I ever grew in a pot becomes root-bound and though some plants appear to be happy growing in pots is a massive compromise though I don't know if that stops or where/when it reduces as you move to larger containers and containers of different fabric.

A raised bed is an example of a container even though it's more like open ground if the soil beneath the growing-levels has also been prepared/loosened for drainage.

A wooden trug is getting closer to a pot so how-about laying gravel in the bottom then grit over the gravel then grit in whatever compost you decide on. This year I used those nutrient pellets that release over six months, (They say) so far they are working well and stop me from over-feeding and killing my plants.

I'm not qualified to give advise so please accept my comments as sharing what I'm doing and if, or not, that it's working. And I am interested in successful container growing.

I think growing in containers is fraught with problems in the hot summer months because the roots get so hot which they don't like . I once grew several batches of potatoes in those green plastic potato sacks which are advertised. They were located in a sunny position on the patio and on a warm day if you out yiur hand on the side of the sack you could almost have poached an egg on it, it was so hot. Even if you water copiously in those conditions the compost gets too hot for the comfort of many roots and plants.

I hadn't thought about heat though the best example I can give, and I can't explain, Mark Diaconi the River Cottage gardener says not to even attempt to grow French Tarragon in pots.

I almost lost my four plants trying to get them to grow in pots, now they are in a bed they are very happy. That's not to say I can't grow things in pots and I choose clay for it's absorbency and coolness against plastic.

Also, size matters.

Small containers have to be a transition, as soon as you move a plant to a bigger pot then open ground, with each move is I have been rewarded with a happier plant.

It's about time the garden marking people worked on a data-base of plants that are happy or unhappy in containers and the reasons why before they happily sell stuff to us that is likely to fail. When I asked out nursery owners they said they regard their custom as a throwaway society that are happy to buy new plants rather than keep them happy, collect seed, re-sow and do them out of trade.

A neighbour with whom I share stuff and I had assumed knowledgable because her garden looked so smart didn't understand about perennials-v-annuals and bi-annuals. Some plants came back every year but got grubby so she dug them out and bought new ones rather than learn about pruning and splitting. Fortunately I'm getting quite a few overgrown plantings that would provide many plants if I have the time though mostly I just cut a few root parts and bin the remaining living material.

As if for the convenience of explaining what I was trying to say I have just cleared-out one of my raised beds that had been over-planted with Sweet Rocket.

Even though I had watered this bed there was so much foliage that the water didn't get to the soil, the whole eight foot by eight foot bed was root-bound though it wasn't stagnant because I had dug a lot of grit into the mixture along with the dreaded local-authority green waste compost to loosen up the sticky clay soil.

This raised bed is my view of what happens in a pot or other container and I'm as bad as anyone for overcrowding, trying to make use of the little space I have for growing.