Graham Rice5 April 2012
The Weekender

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Plants need food and all soils contain at least some plant nutrients. Even a heap of builder's sand has something to sustain plants, as the occasional luxuriant builder's yard weed will testify. But growing plants in sand would be like feeding your children ground-up plates.

Garden soil usually contains a little sand, along with a huge variety of other materials. The important ones are organic matter, clay and plant foods. Organic matter is important as it improves the physical structure of the soil and as it rots it releases plant foods; while clay is important because the plant foods can be bound to it chemically so they don't wash away in the rain.

If you mulch with bark from the garden centre, or dig in garden compost, eventually it will rot down and release plant foods. However, this takes time. Apply organic matter regularly and eventually you'll have a steady stream of plant foods being released, but for something more immediate, you need fertilisers out of a bag or a bottle. There are two main kinds of fertiliser. General fertilisers contain a range of foods suitable for a wide variety of plants, while plant-specific fertilisers are formulated to suit individual plants. Both come dry, to spread on the soil, or as liquids or powders to dissolve in a watering can.

The old favourite among general fertilisers to spread as dry granules is Growmore, which contains a balance of the three main plant foods. It's great value at around £8 for 25kg. The organic equivalent, blood, fish and bone, can cost more than twice as much, but also contains some minor, but still important, nutrients. Good-value plant foods that you dissolve in water include Miracle-Gro and Phostrogen.

Beware the ready-touse plant foods like Miracle-Gro Pour and Feed and Baby Bio Ready To Use. One spoonful out of a £2.79 (500g) pack of Miracle-Gro will make as much liquid feed as a whole bottle of Miracle-Gro Pour and Feed, which costs about £2.25. Admittedly, the Pour and Feed is richer and you don't use so much, but you can nevertheless see that it doesn't make financial sense.

The most useful of the specific feeds are for roses. Products such as Bio Toprose can also be used on shrubs and climbers, or tomatoes - for which J Arthur Bower's Tomato Food looked the best buy in my garden centre this week - and lawns. The best value in lawn food is one that also contains ingredients to deal with moss and weeds such as Bio Supergreen Feed, Weed and Mosskiller.

For house plants, Baby Bio is the traditional food and it works well. Chempak, however, also produces a range of feeds for specific plants such as African violets and cacti. These are less easy to find in garden centres; ring Chempak on 01992 890770 for information about stockists.

WHICH, in a nutshell, are the real essentials, those you cannot do without? I'd go for Growmore, which you can spread around just about everything, plus a feed-and-weed treatment for the lawn. And, as a pick-meup and a regular feed for vegetables, house plants and hanging baskets and tubs, I recommend using liquid tomato food. Simply buy the biggest bottle you can find; as it's sure to be the best value. With these three items, you will transform your garden.

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