Kitchen Garden Forum

Following on from Catherine's post about her deceased cucumber, I normally have no problems growing the mini cucumbers outside but having planted out three plants in a border a couple of weeks ago, covering them with large mineral water bottle cloches, they are all looking rather yellow and sickly. This has never happened before and I'm wondering if it is because I added a very generous helping of bagged composted stable manure to the soil beforehand. I'm wondering exactly what goes into this material, where it comes from and whether it is a source of some of the vegetable problems I've had in the past. Does anybody else use this bagged manure? I can't get hold of the genuine article unfortunately

Hi Primrose

I have recently bought quite a few bags of this sort of "composted stable manure" and rightly or wrongly I've added several bags to the maincrop potato bed to top up soil levels. So far, so good and they're growing well.

But after reading your post I now feel hesitant in planting out my runner bean plants where this compost has been quite thickly incorporated. I'd also planned on adding it to my outdoor tomato/cucumber bed. It does say on the bag though that it is ok for planting, but not so good for seed sewing unless well mixed with soil. Surely if its well composted it is not going to be too strong for small plants including cucumbers. Perhaps quality/content differs considerably between various makes.

I've used 4 bags for each of the last 3 seasons forked into the greenhouse borders without any problems. I thought it was cleaner for the greenhouse than the real stuff or compost.

The yellowing could be down to a nutrient defficiency or the stable manure buring the roots. If you can recognise it for what it is then it may have not been'composted' enough. I would only apply this in autumn and dig it in. prefferably it need to be old so the heat and the salts have disappated from it.

If you have no more plants available then I would take them out and make a larger hole filled with potting compost and re plant to stand a chance of not wasting them. Apply a liquid feed such as plant magic which also acts as a stimulant. see www.superspray.co.uk

I would buy the manure now and stack it somewhere or mix it in the compost heap and use next year.