Reply To: Plant directly into the compost? Really?

[Kathryn]

When beginner gardeners say they’ve used compost close inquiry often discovers that they’ve actually used whatever was cheapest at the garden centre, even if that happens to be pure peat. I wonder if that is what those poor herbs got planted into. Personally I always reckon that the critical stages to watch for in compost maturity is firstly when the worms move in, indicating that the initial thermophilic bacteria have finished their work and that any vermicides in there, if you happen to be using animal manure, have decomposed. And then I look for seeds to start germinating – if they can plant themselves in there I can plant in there. Full maturity is of course indicated when the worms move out again because they’ve run out of food. I like to have a pretty permanent understory of self sown salad crops in my polytunnel – I just weed out the inedible, or at least the things I either didn’t know were edible or are too rampageous. Goose grass is edible but I try to turn it into salad at the seed leaf stage so it doesn’t climb the tomato plants and strangle them.