Top dressing means spreading nutritious organic material on your garden several inches thick, like a mulch. A lot of composts that people are using are being made with green waste. This sounds great, but you have no idea what has gone in to the green waste and sadly people are finding lots of plastic and their plants are dying or having stunted growth due to Aminopyralid and garden weed-killers which are present in the green waste. There is no traceability for green waste composts, so you could be putting anything in to your vegetable and flower beds. After all that hard work growing plants from seed, or buying lovely bulbs, you don’t want to lose them all!
We recommend you use our nutrient rich compost or our plant feed and soil conditioner for top dressing, for a fully traceable, certified organic product you can rely on.
Benefits of top dressing:
Top dressing has lots of benefits. Firstly, our soil conditioner is a potent plant food that will kick-start your vegetable and flower garden. Simply spreading this high-energy plant food on your beds and around your established plants and letting it gradually be worked in to the soil by worms will provide a slow release supply of nutrition.
Secondly, top dressing will help to smother weeds for the rest of the season. If you take the trouble to pull or cut down established garden weeds before spreading it, a top dressing of compost or soil conditioner will help to suppress existing weeds and prevent new ones from sprouting. This frees you from weeding chores, and adds organic nutrition to your garden soil.
Additionally, next year when you start to prepare your garden for planting, the compost or soil conditioner you add this year will have been mixed in with your garden soil by the worms. This wonderful rich, moist mixture will help to break up clay soils and improve the structure of the soil. It is a sure-fire way to boost the performance of almost everything you grow. It’s rare to find a row-crop vegetable garden with loose, rich, well-drained and healthy soil. In order to have fluffy, fertile soil you must add fresh organic material into your garden every season.
Its important to remember to mulch around existing plants that already have an established root system. It will help to keep the soil and roots warm, retain the moisture in the summer and slowly release the nutrients over the growing and flowering period.
Both our compost and soil conditioner are Ph neutral, so you can mulch your acidic loving plants like Blueberries and Camellias without affecting the Ph levels in the soil.
Love your garden and give it a magic boost! Click here to find out more about our wonderful compost and our plant feed and soil conditioner.
compost, flower beds, mulch, soil conditioner, top dress, vegetable beds
