Yesterday was a nice day so I decided to try and pot up my tomato and Jalapeño plants. The missus and the kids went out with some friends and took our car, so when I realised I needed compost I had no choice but to use my own.
I wasn't really looking forward to doing this because I thought it might be messy and smelly, and although I had got compost from the bin before through the hatch on the front I have never exposed and sorted the whole pile before. I lifted the entire bin of and shovelled the contents onto a tarpaulin on the lawn, I then put the bin back in place and threw any obviously un-composted materials back in the bin. Running the rest through a sieve into a wheel barrow and throwing anything that didn't fit through the sieve back into the bin I ended up with a whole wheel barrow full of free compost. No smell at all even from the semi-composted material. The only slight down side was a wasp had seemed to have taken up residence in the bin which was probably my fault because I hadn't put the hatch back on properly. This wasp seemed to hang around for ages looking for its old home that had probably been sieved and/or sorted.
I decided to add some sharp sand to the mix (about 1 part in 5), a couple of dashes of blood fish and bone I got a box of in a pound shop and some vermiculite. I surprised myself with the look of the mix. It looked really quite good. When I had potted my first Tomato plant up I watered it in the compost seemed a little to clay like. So I decided to mix in a little of my left over B&Q peat free compost which appears to be made up mostly of woody fibres.
All pleased with myself I potted up the rest of the Toms and all four Jalapeños. The 10 Tomato plants will stay outside from now on as they have been spending the daytime all this week on the back step and I simply don't have room for them inside now they are in bigger pots. The Jalapeños will stay inside for a while longer yet (fortunately there is only 4 of them).
