How Does Your Garden Grow?

[DAPPH]

They do if you grind the (washed) eggshells down in a pestle and mortar, and sprinkle this around the compost. Just throwing cracked eggshells in is pretty much a waste of time and just creates an annoyance in the soil.

No need to wash egg shells the disinfectant & alkaline content in the soap will kill the bacteria that will grow on the proteins on the inside of the egg shells worm eggs & baby worms thrive on it .

 

[DAPPH]

Who'd have thought slinging rotten vegetables in a trench could be so therapeutic!

https://flic.kr/p/2qBsuso

Keep filling it , then by the time you are about to pot sow your beans stop filing it and cover it with six inches of soil .. it will sink down as the material rots down .

 

[Greeves246]

Tip. Don’t use grass cuttings in your compost if you use weed and feed on your lawn/grass.

 

[Onoff]

No need to wash egg shells the disinfectant & alkaline content in the soap will kill the bacteria that will grow on the proteins on the inside of the egg shells worm eggs & baby worms thrive on it .

I'm quite happy tbh with eggshell in the soil. Monkey nut shells too that SWMBO insists on putting in the black refuse sack. Looking in the compost from years ago in the bin I just emptied, it was well rotted down albeit dry & rock hard. I lifted the bin off like a jelly mould and had to take a mattock to the heap to break it up. Did find a few plastic milk bottle foil lids, labels off of fruit and even those small white sticks from boiled sweet type lollies. SWMBO has this "system" where we have a plastic tub on the counter into which teabags, the milk foil lids, eggshells, peelings, wrappers off cheese, butter etc go into and it gets sorted after??? I try and sort as I go.

The eggshell bits in the old compost are quite soft now.

Tbh we waste so much bought fruit and veg it's an absolute joke. I keep on at SWMBO about it. Suggested yesterday we have Tesco deliver straight to the bean trench "I thought you were going to eat it!" she says.

"I thought you were going to cook it!" I say.

 

[Greeves246]

Made several raised bed s from pallet collars for an area that gets waterlogged being on clay. The double one will have new potatoes in , one for flowers and one for onions, perhaps rhubarb.

 

[Jelly_Sheffield]

Tip. Don’t use grass cuttings in your compost if you use weed and feed on your lawn/grass.

Depends on the components.

If you used a product with pre-emergent herbicides targeting broadleaf plants (2,4D, dicamba, mecoprop and MCPA being common) then it will persist for minimum 2 years in a conventional anaerobic compost heap/bin, but that goes down to between 2-9 months in one that is well aerated and has good microbial activity (as per commercial IVC and windrow composting operations).

However, increasingly you see cheaper "weed and feed" products that are just iron sulphate/phosphate (as mosskiller) combined with a heavy dose of high nitrogen fertiliser (because grass can utilise nitrogen at much higher levels than common weed species will even tolerate).

So with those products if you blending with low nitrogen sources of organic carbon (like woodchip), and allowing to fully digest, then it should result in a quite acceptable compost at the end.

 

[Onoff]

Keep filling it , then by the time you are about to pot sow your beans stop filing it and cover it with six inches of soil .. it will sink down as the material rots down .

You're saying leaving the trenches open?

Right or wrong, my intent was a layer of compost at the bottom, a layer of cherry leaves, some manure then backfill with dirt.

Then cover the whole patch in breathable & porous weed fabric until bean planting time.

 

[Pigeon_Droppings2]

On the allotment I cover the plot over the winter...remove covers in early spring and dig over to get rid of weeds...then recover.

When it's time to plant I dig a large hole...stick manure pellets in the hole and back fill with compost and plant into that.

I have use trenches in the past but that was to bury cough grass...deep enough to kill it off.

 

[droopsnoot]

My compost heap never seems to rot down, I don't know whether it's just too sheltered in the corner between two conifer hedges. I've tried to make sure they're cut back (though not this year) so the rain can get on there. Last time I dug down to the bottom of the pile it just seemed like dried stuff.

 

[Onoff]

My compost heap never seems to rot down, I don't know whether it's just too sheltered in the corner between two conifer hedges. I've tried to make sure they're cut back (though not this year) so the rain can get on there. Last time I dug down to the bottom of the pile it just seemed like dried stuff.

Our 3 bins are behind a tall conifer hedge so always shaded. Two don't have lids on even. Chuck out a few spuds that are passed their best and we get potato plants in there.