The best potting compost is the one you make yourself. I love making compost: it’s like baking bread, or making cakes. You combine lots of lovely sweet-smelling, crumbly ingredients and mix them together, ideally with your hands (though a spade is probably quicker) and create magic.
I hoard future compost ingredients: in the old broken-down lean-to at the top end of the garden I have bags of woodchip filched from a local tree surgeon a couple of years ago, rotting down nicely in the rain. They’re almost ready to use: it takes two years for them to reach just the right level of rich, crumbly, fruitcake darkness. Making your own compost is not a thing to be hurried.
Inexplicably, I don’t have enough autumn leaves falling on my garden (I know! And yes, I do have a lot of trees: this is one of the great mysteries of my little corner of Somerset. I think they may simply blow away and settle in the neighbouring fields). So I have to collect them from other people. One of the gardens I look after is in the crook of a massive old craggy beech tree, its branches so long they sweep down almost to the ground. It smothers all beneath it in thick carpets of autumn leaves every year. The owners don’t want them, so I fill sack after sack like treasure to bring home and compost down in old builder’s bags (I’ll build proper leafmould bins one day, if I get around to it). Again – two years, minimum, for potting compost grade leafmould.
The other ingredients are mostly just lying around. The loam comes straight out of the garden, and the garden compost from my bins if I haven’t run out: I also use the municipal green waste I buy in for mulching sometimes, or if I can persuade the local farmer to let me have some of the digestate out of his biodigester, that works well too.
I think my plants grow better in home-made compost, though I haven’t yet done a trial to prove it. Certainly they’re more reliable than bagged, as you know exactly what’s gone into them. You do get some weed seedlings popping up, but they really are no trouble to pinch out as you do your daily seedling patrols. And you save a packet, especially these days when potting mixes are shooting up in price.
Each application works a little differently though: so here are the five recipes I use most often. You will in time develop your own special blends, and they’ll all be peat free and plastic free, and zero transport miles too – as sustainable as potting compost gets.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Greenery to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.