Veg feeds vs compost

[mhrfm]

Is buying feeds for your veg really necessary for good veg patch harvests, or is growing your veg in good quality compost enough?

The veg we are growing: broccoli, brussel sprouts, kale, carrots, salad greens, beans, cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, leeks, onions, courgettes, chard and spinach.

[Snadger]

Hi mhrfm

I presume if you are growing in compost you are growing in containers? If so, potting compost only has enough fertiliser to last a short time. It would be advantageous to feed with either a granular or liquid feed at intervals recommended on packaging of product.
Some of the John Innes soil based composts would probably be better for veg as they have a longer lasting fertiliser added and more 'body' and weight especially for brassicas.

[rary]

A very good question that, the stock answer being, you don't feed the plants, you feed the soil, but basicly you don't need to buy feeds for your veg. if you put in plenty of compost, the main word there being plenty, for the average gardeners composting all their material and returning it to the soil you would get good harvests for a time but each year the minerals and nutrients would get depleted, which leads to smaller harvests, but again if you bring in additional materials like manure or even grass and weed stuff you would need quite a lot to maintain the good fertility of the soil, so compair a bag of fertiliser, whither organic or inorganic, which you can spread over the soil, with a trailer load of manure which it would take to equal a couple of bags of fertiliser and the work of moving and storing it you might understand why people buy feeds, so my answer to your question is that if you can't maintain a good compost supply you will need to buy some feed, if I was offered a couple of bags of good quality feed or a trailer load of manure, I would go for the manure as the difference it would make to the soil makes it worth all the work

[ameno]

If you are growing in pots, then no, absolutely not. The fertiliser in compost lasts 4-8 weeks. It's enough for short-lived crops, like salad leaves or radishes, or for undemanding crops, like carrots, but that's about it. That's not to say you simply won't get a crop from others crops in pots of compost if you don't feed them, it's just it will be a lot smaller than it could have been, as after a while they will be nutrient-starved.

If you are growing in the ground, then as long as you have reasonably nutrient-retentive soil (loam or clay, in other words), then for most crops simply adding a generous dose of general fertiliser (like Growmore, poultry manure, or blood, fish & bone) to the soil just before planting is usually enough to see them through the season. Although they would still do even better if given extra feed as the season goes on.

[Mark_Riga]

A lot depends on the compost you use. The best I have used is just this year - Dalefords compost made from wool and bracken. Organic, soil association approved but expensive. Don't think there is a stockist near you but you could check. They deliver. Their compost for tomatoes says you never need to feed them.

For things like courgettes and the cabbage tribe, I tend to dig a hole and put in a good spade of home made compost (all the weeds from year before last that have been piled up in a heap). Then just water as needed - and they do need it this year.

The veg plot gets most of the home made compost which comes from weeding the flower beds as well as lawn mowings.

[mhrfm]

Thanks for the insights. Great advice going forward.

[burnie]

For your set up you might consider a no dig approach in your raised beds which involves plenty of food for the soil. What is your soil like? mine is rather thin coastal sandy, so I need to add plant material and manure to aid water retention as well as feeding the plants. Where you grew your Garlic, I noted you didn't clear much of the adjacent grass from the edges of your beds, the grasses will send in roots to steal both food and water from your crops. You might want to consider pathways around the edge, it all helps.

[nickdub]

Not specifically answering the question, but just generally for new gardeners - the plants will tell you a lot if you, if you pay attention to them.

So say you do everything right, put some cabbage plants in the ground in April, look after them, water them, weed them etc, etc and then when it comes time to harvest them you still get a poor crop, you can say with 99% accuracy that there wasn't enough Nitrogen in the soil in a form those plants could use when they needed it - that's what the small plants are telling you.

What you do with this information is a separate question - some people would say get a load of FYM, others more/better compost, the quick answer is Sulphate of Ammonia applied at the correct time - personally I eat maybe 3 cabbages a year all told - so my preference is to grow other things like fruit, and buy any cabbages I want from the shops.