Miracle Gro MPC - avoid!

If you have trouble rewetting compost have you tried a drop of washing up liquid in the water, not at every watering but just if it has got totally dry.

 

Looking at those images, I would say that has been made with very high percentage of wood fibre.

 

When you pay good money for compost it shouldn't be necessary to sieve it. I agree that the Miracle-Gro stuff is carp and has been for a few years now.

 

Obviously the quality of compost can change from year to year, especially the peat free stuff, but l have used Godwin's compost & found it to be good quality. The same goes for their top soil and soil improver.

 

Totally agree John, we have brought peat free compost to market, but we don't offer a multi-purpose one. We have went down the route of a, universal seed & cutting compost and a General Potting compost.

Our seed & cutting is available in 40L bags and cost more per litre due to a higher percentage of coir. The general potting comes in 60L bags, it is cheaper per litre but that is due to less coir and a higher percentage of wood fibre.

 

I dont think you should sieve it, I wouldn't, but if you are seed sowing and want something fine a bag of seed compost is a good idea if you reliably want fine stuff.
I admit that looks a bit coarse but I can see it might work for potting on larger plants.

 

I made the mistake of buying 3 bags of Miracle Gro last week as it was on offer but on opening it does appear to be very wet wood fibre and not much else. I have the feeling this will be like the Verve I (mistakenly again) bought last year and feed just leached through tom buckets within seconds, nothing to retain it.

 

Interesting, I don't see them in my Morrisons and I often go in there, I thought they might just be an online thing as I don't buy much gardening stuff online.
I like the storage idea.

 

I always find composts marked 'all purpose' tend to be for mulching and topping up pots.
I never use stuff straight out of a bag...I always mix stuff with it to suit my needs. Coarse sand and crushed perlite for seeds, 10mm ballast for a larger 'pot on' and perlite, coarse sand(depending what needs more drainage) homemade compost and any other 'stuff' I need to get rid of, like old compost(sterilised). I so rarely use vermiculite, i didn't mention it

I got some from the poundshop. Not overly or underly impressed

 

The show bench growers of carrots and parsnips will sieve the compost, generally through a 6mm mesh. They don't want anything lumpy or sharp to mark the crop, what does not pass through the sieve they just put at the bottom of pots for other crops or plants. There is only a few substrates that you can pass through a fine sieve, peat, coir, sand and soil. I knocked up some carrot & parsnip compost using coir to get feedback from a couple of show bench growers. The compost was fine enough for them but only time will tell if they get the same results compared to using peat as the down side with coir is leaching of nutrients.

 

I think we have got used to the so called multi purpose compost as being the one size fits all answer to all things growing.
It might have been, up to a point, when it was 100% peat, but I dont think its ever going to be the same again.
We will all have to get used to doing a certain amount of mixing to get what we consider is a good compost in future.
Its like going back 100 yrs.

 

I currently source my coir from India.

Coir Products | Remmy Substrates

The coir comes in 5kg blocks to us and is offered in the following, raw, single washed, double washed and double washed and buffered. With the raw coir not being washed the recommendation is to only use up to 25% depending on what your growing, single washed up to 50%, double washed up to 75% with double washed and buffered you can use neat. Double washed and buffered is what I use in the peat free seed & cutting, which is expensive, currently about £550-580 per ton depending on the exchange rate.

 

Manure.......


You can't have too much of it. Fresh will help activate your own compost pile.
I remember being told as a kid to go out with a bucket and the coal scuttle to get the droppings from the rag and bone mans horse!

 

I'm not that old.