[muckyboots]

HI after years of buying small bags of compost and soil improver and mulching the garden with my compost bit by bit I'm thinking of getting two bulk bags( builders type) to put on the flower beds and veg patch, can anyone recommend a supplier. My soil is old gravel pits clay and stone and has little to no water retention, its getting better year on year, i'm just trying to speed up the process .Thanks

[fatcat1955]

Have a look on ebay.

[Steveharford]

I bought some for a job yesterday from Travis perkins. 43 plus vat i think. looks very good stuff from its texture but obviously wont know about the nutrients for a while.
edit: Just reread the header. It was actually topsoil that i bought. Would probably do what you are looking for though.

[Kristen]

Can you get manure (Farmyard or Stable), Spent hops or Mushroom compost?

They are likely to be cheaper than proprietary bagged solutions.

(With manure you need an assurance that the animals have not been fed with hay / silage made from grass that was treated with aminopyralid)

[Headgardener22]

If you're looking for standard compost, there's a company called Dejex that will supply 100 bags, but only in a limited area, try looking for horticultural suppliers in your area.

[Annen]

Our city council sells soil improver by the tonne at £16.  It isn't as good as mpcompost but it would help water retention.  Perhaps yours does too, some sell it bagged and some by the load dumped outside your door. Ours is the latter 

[muckyboots]

Thanks for all your tips .Interesting about the hay never thought about that as we have a horse hospital near by i'll have to ask before getting any manure from them. Cheers .

[mobilekat]

After lots of searching earlier this year we ended up buying the 120L bags of verve from B&Q, as this was cheaper than anything we could get delivered-really didn't make sense!
But was easy to handle with a borrow , and has helped!

Going to get some mushroom compost delivered at  some point , and have been composting everything we can! As soil very poor here- years of neglect by previous owners.

Have green manure growing too to help a bit too!

Local council doesn't sell anything worth having here, and local Stables don't know wants been out on the hay!

[Kristen]

After lots of searching earlier this year we ended up buying the 120L bags of verve from B&Q, as this was cheaper than anything we could get delivered-really didn't make sense!

The MPC I've been buying from local Sheds seems to have more muck in it year-on-year.  I don't buy stuff that is rubbish, but equally I do get quite a lot of throw-away from sieving it.

Commercial growers don't seem to use that stuff, whatever plants that I buy are grown in, it looks a million times better than the cheap stuff I can buy in the sheds.

So I decided to buy that instead.  I can't buy at the same price as the local garden centre (even excluding delivery and assuming that I buy 100 bags at once), but the few bags (of different grades) that I bought as a test are a lot nicer to work with.  My side-by-side test was a bit late, and on too few plants, this year so I will do a test next Spring with the remnants of the MPC I have from the local Shed and my nice new mouthwatering! Sinclair commercial composts

[mumofstig]

Beechgrove gardens are always testing peat-free with peat-based (which professionals use) and the peat-based gives reliably better results. They showed a comparison again on Thursday last's programme.

Sinclairs use peat in their mixes.
http://www.william-sinclair.co.uk/industrial/applications/compost_formulations

Another peat-based option available quite widely is
Jack's Magic worth looking out for, if you have no objections to using peat