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Starting out...
Little green thumb
Posts: 1
in Talkback
Good evening all,
Let me start by saying "I have no idea what i'm doing"...
I have a small urban garden, recently turfed with an empty south-facing border waiting for me to experiment on. I've bought the inspiration books, visited the flower shows, studied my soil and discovered some good nurseries. I'm just about to order some manure online to dig into my borders in preparation for planting perennials in early Autumn BUT should I acutally be leaving the manure to settle and do it's thing and put off planting until next Spring?
Any advice would be extremely appreciated!
0
Posts
You will get better results if you get the manure down now and delay planting until next spring. Doing that will give the worms (and the frosts) time to do their work. If you have room you can still buy the perennials now and grow them on in pots (re-potting into larger ones if necessary) then plant them out next spring. Planting larger, well-grown plants tends to give better results than planting small ones as some may not survive their first winter in the soil. Larger specimens are usually considerably more expensive so that is also a good way of saving money.
Having said that I have sometimes been a bit impatient and have dug-in (very well rotted) manure and planted straight into it and most things survived.
Firstly you do sound like you know what you are doing by making a good start, with books, visiting shows, getting advise etc...
Providing the manure is well rotted down after digging in you can plant up. I'd be inclined to leave it a couple of weeks but you would certainly be able to plant up before early Autumn to allow your plants to take root before Winter sets in.