Browse Forums Landscape & Garden Design Re: Feed the soil, Never feed the plant 34Apr 15, 2013 11:19 am I have one setup and love how easy it is to apply all the good stuff. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Got it through evilbay freight bit high but couldnt find any supplier in Oz back then. Bit hard to use with hand nozzle as it sucks 1 litre when watering lawn in about 5 min through 10 mp rotators. Hope this helps Re: Feed the soil, Never feed the plant 35Apr 18, 2013 8:15 pm Use a cheap plastic rubbish bin, rather than a bucket. Make the siphon hose longer using some additional tube from the hardware shop. Re: Feed the soil, Never feed the plant 36Apr 18, 2013 8:22 pm Important to use only organic based inputs as the risk of contaminating the household water is high. Never apply poisons with these. Re: Feed the soil, Never feed the plant 37Apr 18, 2013 8:23 pm Yeah, Simon is waiting on stock so it maybe a while. Amazon and Ebay have them. Re: Feed the soil, Never feed the plant 39Aug 11, 2014 8:37 pm In my last garden I worked with alluvial clay, albeit alluvial soil is pretty good to begin with but it is very dense and does water log easily. It also bakes hard as concrete in the summer months and is impervious to surface water. It is also very easily compacted if you happen to stand on it. Every kind of dirt has it's challenge. I got very good results with some pretty simple methods. - Cut down excess banana trees and bury the logs 1-2 feet down. Banana logs are very fibrous, not woody and they are basically mostly water. But once decomposed in the earth they break up this heavy clay beautifully while releasing their water content where the plant roots were. - Grow borage by the tonne. I let it get weedy all over the garden and go to seed. Spilling it's seed absolutely everywhere. After it had seeded I ripped it up whole and buried it in the soil 1ft deep. Just two successive seasons of this saw the earthworm population explode and our soil go from concrete in summer and bog in winter to rich, deep friable earth that could grow anything. - Scraped the chicken yard periodically and mixed the raw manure into the garden while digging in the above. I then planted seed directly into this, regardless of how hot the manure was and everything sprouted and grew prolifically. We got so good at digging in the green waste from the garden that eventually we ran out and had to slow down the progression of garden beds waiting for more material. The banana trees had at one stage swallowed half the yard but were pushed back to the fenceline with our incessant need for the logs for gardening. My new garden method was the same after this, dig a trench with a mattock into unimproved soil, lay banana logs in the trench, mix raw manure with the soil, push the soil back over the logs, sow seed directly into it. Mulch over the top. We never had a garden bed failure with this method. That sucks! Hope it all works out. Good to move away from steel anyway for all your reasons, but it's also thermally poor. 16 18013 0 4751 We were lucky in that our old house was so small (86 square metres) compared to the new house, they were able to take enough readings around the old backyard house before… 8 37569 |