Sometimes something nice happens, Thanks John.
After I had put in an order for Fertile Fibre materials
last year, you asked me to comment on my experience with it over the growing
season. As I would now like to put in another order, I thought it was about
time I let you know how I got on.
First,
the order arrived promptly, it was well-packaged and convenient, and I had no
trouble handling it. Re-hydrating the coir blocks was easy – I crumbled a block
into a wheelbarrow, added a bucket of water and left it covered overnight.
I
could not have picked a worse year to try out new products or techniques in the
garden. It was an absolutely rotten growing season. Parts of the local town,
Hebden Bridge, were seriously flooded four times, and national news
organisations seem to have set up permanent camp in Market Street to film the
next episode of devastation. We are up on the hills above the town, but even
so, the ground was sodden for the whole summer and still has not recovered.
Worse, I suspect, from a growing point of view, were the constant poor levels
of light, due to the almost permanent cloud cover. We got very poor germination
of anything sown direct, and a small crop of small everything.
That said, my experience of using fertile fibre seed
compost to sow and bring on seedlings inside for planting out was very
positive. Only germination of onions and peas was poor, and I do not think that
was the fault of the compost. I tried growing some perennial poppies as an
experiment, and that has worked extremely well so far. My neighbour took half
of them, and we have planted them out as bonny young plants, and we await
results next year. If anything goes wrong now, it won’t be anything to do with
the compost.
You
suggested crumbling a block of coir and spreading it dry on a patch of my plot,
as a means of lightening my heavy soil. I was sceptical, but I tried it, and
that patch was very much easier to work than any other. I have ordered extra
blocks this year. I’m afraid it did not improve the performance of the crops,
but then, that might be asking too much in the growing season just past. We
shall see again this year, provided we get a better season.
The reason I ordered Fertile Fibre composts was that in
recent years I have had trouble with other commercial composts due, I think, to
contamination with herbicide residues, coming from animal manure. This showed
itself as a kind of mass damping-off, and seedlings which germinated but then
refused to grow. I certainly had no trouble like that this year.
So, this year, we shall have perfect weather – a fine
spring, and a summer with plenty of sunshine and rain every third night. Blight
will somehow forget to visit the potatoes and the couch grass will contract
some sort of dreadful disease which wipes it out. Then I’ll only have myself to
blame for everything that goes wrong.
