Kitchen Garden Forum

Do veg. carrots, peas, beetroot grown in pots and potatoes grown in a bag need feeding?, they are sown in multi purpose compost, if they need feeding what would be best to feed them on.

The query comes from a young chap that works in the same office as my daughter, its his 1st. year growing veg.

Thanks for any replies.
Bren.

All compost has a limited amount of nutrition in it, I would advise using a soil based, mix in some pelletted chicken manure (a good couple of handfuls per builders bucket of compost) From then on after a couple of months, regular feed with a proprietory product will help the veg on it's way. Without the feed you will get poor crops in terms of quality and quantity.

You could do worse than buying growbags and decanting the contents into the pots, feeding after six to eight weeks of growth

CoMpO

I don't grow anything direct in growbags but use the material from them to fill the pots in which I grow peppers, aubergines & chillis. I always mix in a handful of chicken manure pellets or some composted manure into the compost before planting as I suspect that in a long growing season the compost could start to run out of nutrition just at the time when they're fruiting. I also provide a liquid feed at that point. . I stand the pots in drip trays so that any surplus liquid which drains out, which will have this fertiliser diluted in it can be recycled and added back to the pot when the compost has dried out a little.

Morning Bren

I have just seen your post. I agree with what has been said above. I have for years grown potatoes in bags filled with compost (due to a lack of space), I use compost and put some potato fertiliser in at the start, and again when I put more compost in to fill the bag. So far this has worked well. Only thing I would suggest is giving each bag a galon of water a day, they dont half dry out quick

As for the carrots I use a john innis no 2 soil based compost, as the others tend to have too much nutrients in them. Which leads to some verry unusual lookin carrots (learned form experience). After that I just use water. So for so good.

Hope this helps a bit.