Raised beds and pots

[Spunky]

Bear with me it's only my second year lol I have a couple of small raised beds and do a lot of veg in morrisons pots
To be honest all I was going to do was add a good handfull of chicken pellets per pot and a good even spread over the raised beds is this ok
The other thing is the soil is 90% mpc and 10% top soil should I have added manure at an earlier time?
thanks

[Two_Sheds]

You don't need manure at all in gardening, and certainly not in containers.

MPC tends to be a bit light & fluffy, unless you bought the John Innes No.3 recipe? It's not ideal for greedy or long-term plants. You want MORE topsoil, ideally.

Bear in mind that chicken poo is alkaline, so this might affect things like spuds, which get scabby in alkaline soil

[Spunky]

Thanks 2 sheds I don't think it was John innes mainly bq

[Two_Sheds]

OK.

Grow the ungreedy stuff in your Morrisons buckets, and feed them (I use comfrey tea for everything).

Dedicate your raised beds to the stuff that's in the ground for longer. Start beefing up the soil in the raised beds, it wants to be like the soil in the ground, nice and firm and earthy smelling.

Make garden compost, put it in the beds. The lazy way, the way that I use now, is to chop up my weeds and old foliage with secateurs, and drop the bits onto the raised bed. They soon disappear as the worms drag them under for you.

Molehill soil is very good quality, but it's heavy: I won't try getting it on my bike again.



Chicken pellets are all the rage, but I've never used them. Commercial farms have found a market for a waste product, and it's become a "must have". Same with farmyard manure: in the old days there was a surplus of animal muck, and it was heavily pushed at the home grower. I've never used it: I grow green manures though, lots of them.

[Spunky]

Good idea about the mole hills I'll look out for them, thanks for the help :-) tbh I only bought the chicken pellets because they were cheap lol

[Potstubsdustbins]

Dig in a good quantity of NPK neutral fertilizer to start with. Blood, fish and bone or Growmore, depends on whether you are organic or not. Use a larger container to mix whats not in the raised beds.

This will give your plants a good start, later you can then use fertilizers that are suited to the specific plants you are growing in that bed or pot.

Potty