Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: Sophie_Chilli on November 13, 2010, 19:54
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Apologies in advance if this has already been covered - I did a search but couldn't find anything.
Basically I've got eight potato grow bags full of compost that now have no-where to go.
Is it okay to transfer the soil to my composter to use again next year?
I will point out that as far as I know none of the potatoes I grew in the bags had any diseases although may have suffered from pests as the leaves on top got eaten somewhat but the outcome was fine!
As you can imagine eight bags meant quite a lot of compost was bought and I'd hate to just chuck it all in the bin!
Any advice gratefully received. :D
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well I did a search for 're-use compost' and 2 pages of topics came up..............and the consensus of opinion was that people put theirs either direct onto beds as soil conditioner or in the compost heap.
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I agree with Mum... I would always use mine for putting on my beds to help 'bulk' up the soil levels, I think once used, the majority of nutrients in the compost would heve been taken up by whatever was planted in it previously... :)
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Also if you put a covering on top of your compost bin you will get rid of the anoying fruit flies, at least for a while
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I would be tempted to keep the bags and add chicken manure and/or a half bag of bagged manure from a garden centre to each grow bag and reuse.
The compost we buy is very often simply a medium into which they makers have added nutrients in liquid form. The compost itself therefore simply being a pretty dormant medium that simply provides support for the plant to grow in. The nutrient is added.
That is why you need to added liquid feeds to things grown in the various composts.
Otherwise I tend to use mine as a soil conditioner where ever I think it could be useful to make the soil structure more open.
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I know this isn't the normal thing to do.
But what i do with used compost, is to add some chicken manure and some tomato fertiliser mix it with the compost and then leave it for about a week. After a week give a quick stir and put it into cotainers ready for planting.
I did this over the summer and it worked really well.
hth
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Whack it all into a spare bed, plant some clover on it, dig it in once it's grown nicely then bung it over your main plot and dig in. Nitrogen levels receive a lovely boost, and you've not wasted anything! Adding some Rooster will help as well.
Sticking it all on your compost heap is a good option if you've not got much space but there's not really much to rot down in spent compost, so you may actually just be diluting your existing heap.
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I have started to reuse it. Apparently an experiment done by Which showed that reused compost with a bit of slow release fertiliser gave results identical to those of new compost.
Charlie
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Thank you for all the replies. Unfortunatley I haven't got any spare beds to dump it into (smallish gdn) which is why I was thinking the composter would be a good idea - that way I'm adding the nutrients as I go along (also I add bone meal when using it it pots).
Thanks guys, all replies very much welcome. :)