Our local garden centre is very pro-active and offers free delivery, and gives discount to garden club members in January so this year I have had 5 bags of seed sowing compost, 4 grow bags (to pot my tomatoes into ) 3 bags of grit, 2 bags potting on compost and 1 bag of container compost. This is in addition to the 40 large bags of well rotted horse manure from local stables and the contents of 3 compost bins. We have heavy clay soil so it needs all the help we can give it . Garden club also has discount shopping evening at end of may when we all go with our little list and have a lovely time
Great thread as I need loads. I have 3 nz bins but buy regularly. I have had dumpy bags, and I like getting them delivered and placed where I want them, but I didn’t find them good value. If anyone has examples of good prices on these I’d be interested, but i can’t find any locally. I have had some fantastic deals when wickes or similar have a cheap offer on bags, buy lots and get delivery. At the moment I’m getting 120l bags from Homebase 3 for £15 I think that offer finished Monday. Its quite light stuff, but I’m not too bothered about the quality for what I’m doing at the moment.
Thanks everyone for the very interesting replies. It's reassuring that it's not just me that's finding I'm going through the compost at a rate of knots. @topbird's list is pretty much what I thought. In this case it's unfortunate that my allotment plot is covered in bird netting (a good thing in other respects), which makes bulk deliveries impossible as we're not allowed to have stuff dumped on the common parts. One of the reasons for my post was that I collected all the leaves I could in the autumn and filled a wooden composter to overflowing. It's already down to two-thirds it's original size, and I've a feeling that by the time it's ready I'll only have about a couple of spoonfuls left. I've also been warned off the council produce (lots of plastic residue), though even that's surprisingly expensive here. I'm thinking that I'll have to build up slowly and avoid the compost-intensive things like potatoes in sacks in order to be able to have a wider variety of flowering plants in pots. I've also been wondering about combining compost with topsoil to effectively water it down, but am not sure if that would have serious downsides.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
I don’t like to recall how much I have spent on compost over the last year or so, since moving into my new home and discovering it had hard-packed, weed-infested heavy alkaline clay, six inches at most before you hit impenetrables subsoil or rock. 18 cubic metre builders bags of composted manure and erecacious compost so far. Plus loads of extra bags from the garden centre and endless bags of grit. I simply can’t believe where it all goes - I have made six raised veg beds, two or three flower borders and inherited some very sickly fruit trees that I am trying and failing to nurse back to life. Not exactly Monty scale but the compost bill feels like it!
I am using four of the builders bags for home-made compost and leaf mound and swore I would get self sufficient in compost in a year but I think that probably over optimistic...
Mountainous Northern Catalunya, Spain. Hot summers, cold winters.
Got a local "gent" who delivers it in black plastic bags at £1.00 a bag here in Bristol 6 deliveries and only one bad one as it has some wood shavings in it but all is well now
Everyone is just trying to be Happy.....So lets help Them.
Posts
This is in addition to the 40 large bags of well rotted horse manure from local stables and the contents of 3 compost bins. We have heavy clay soil so it needs all the help we can give it .
Garden club also has discount shopping evening at end of may when we all go with our little list and have a lovely time
If anyone has examples of good prices on these I’d be interested, but i can’t find any locally.
I have had some fantastic deals when wickes or similar have a cheap offer on bags, buy lots and get delivery.
At the moment I’m getting 120l bags from Homebase 3 for £15 I think that offer finished Monday. Its quite light stuff, but I’m not too bothered about the quality for what I’m doing at the moment.
One of the reasons for my post was that I collected all the leaves I could in the autumn and filled a wooden composter to overflowing. It's already down to two-thirds it's original size, and I've a feeling that by the time it's ready I'll only have about a couple of spoonfuls left.
I've also been warned off the council produce (lots of plastic residue), though even that's surprisingly expensive here.
I'm thinking that I'll have to build up slowly and avoid the compost-intensive things like potatoes in sacks in order to be able to have a wider variety of flowering plants in pots.
I've also been wondering about combining compost with topsoil to effectively water it down, but am not sure if that would have serious downsides.
I am using four of the builders bags for home-made compost and leaf mound and swore I would get self sufficient in compost in a year but I think that probably over optimistic...
6 deliveries and only one bad one as it has some wood shavings in it but all is well now
Garden compost I make obsessively. I have 80, yes eighty dumpy sacks on the go and 6 big compost bins.