Reclaimed compost
I’m reluctant to dig old, used compost back into the plot. There’s two reasons for this. One is that I don’t want to end up planting the same kind of crops in it year after year, which means that if one year’s crop has disease it’ll pass it onto the next, hence the need for crop rotation.
The other is that it seems a waste to put such a good resource into the plot after it’s been used just once in pots. Particularly as we’re now fertilising the plot for free by digging in three hens-worth of chicken manure when we clean them out every weekend.
So having turned out two new bags of potatoes for this coming weekend and cleared out 20-odd tomato pots from last year ready for transplanting this year’s seedlings, I’ve bagged myself two trugs full of used compost ready to be re-used however it can.
The best plan, I’ve decided, is to use them to start off new seeds. That way no single plant will be planted exclusively in last year’s compost as they will be planted on when they’re large enough.
This is important, as we plan on planting an awful lot of seeds this season – not all for us, but also to give away or sell. Every packet you buy, you see, has a best before date on it, and that’s rarely more than two years into the future. As sure we’re left with a lot of seeds left over from last year that need to be grown this season. To plant them all this year we’d need a garden ten times bigger than we have, and to give it all over to veg, not just the quarter that we have.
So we’re I’m going to make a lot of sleeves with the paper potter, put a little of our pre-loved compost into each one and plant a seed.
Some of them won’t grow, but those that do we’ll nurture until they’re a viable size and then sell them from a little table at the end of the driveway.
By my reckoning, with most of the packets having cost us about £2 a pop and us planning to sell the saplings for about 20p, we need to sell about 10 of each to have made our money back, and then the value of all the vegetables we harvested and ate over the last two years will have been a massive bonus.
Most importantly, though, these old seeds won’t have gone to waste, which is far more important than the little bit of money they will raise.
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Have you looked into sterilising it before reusing it? – pain of a job but worthwhile.
Then if you have a lot of green waste in your compost heap then you can use spent compost as a brown element.