CHAPTER 6
April

April is another busy month: more sowing, more planting out, and you should be starting to harvest your early veg. It’s also a good time to think about companion planting, as the pests are also beginning to wake up.

My Balcony at the Start of April

Plants growing:

Herbs: sage, mint, rosemary, bay, thyme (just starting to grow back), chives, oregano, basil (just moved outside).

Overwintered peas (early dwarf and mangetout) beginning to flower.

Overwintered beans growing well.

Overwintered rocket going to seed.

Overwintered bronze arrowhead lettuce.

Small self-seeded ruby chard.

Early sowings of rocket and bronze arrowhead lettuce doing well.

Seeds and cuttings:

Various tomato seedlings on the windowsill indoors, waiting to be planted out.

Chilli and pepper seeds still germinating.

Basil seeds still germinating.

Tiny carrot seedlings.

Microgreens.

Potatoes chitting in a box inside.

Some of my herbs on the herb table in April.

Peas flowering in April.

Things to Do in April

Tomatoes

I live far enough south, especially given my south-facing, concrete backed balcony and consequent very warm microclimate, that I can start my tomatoes off in March and plant them out in early April if the weather is behaving as usual. For most people, you won’t want to start them off until early April, and then plant out in late April or early May if further north. Bear in mind that tomatoes are delicate and that if you plant them out too early, their progress will be paused if it gets too cold. It’s better to wait until it’s definitely warm enough for them outside. However, starting them as early as possible is a good idea, to give them plenty of time to crop and ripen. One year I wasn’t able to start mine until July, and most of my crop was green.

There are a huge number of varieties of tomatoes, but they fall into two basic categories:

There are also different types of fruit from both categories. The best known are cherry tomatoes (small tomatoes), standard tomatoes (as the name suggests, ‘normal’ tomatoes), beefsteak tomatoes (larger than standard ones), and plum tomatoes (oval, firm, and freeze well). In small spaces your best bet is probably to focus on cherry tomatoes.

Note: if you want to be able to seed save, make sure you buy heritage rather than hybrid tomatoes.

Sowing

Ripe cherry tomatoes in late summer – note the string supporting the vine-type plant.

Sow tomato seeds either one to a small seed plug, or a couple to a slightly larger pot. Different varieties will take different lengths of time to germinate, but 1-2 weeks is normal. Make sure you label the varieties when you’re sowing so later on you will know which varieties worked best for you. Once you have ripened fruit, you can very easily seed save from the plants that worked best, as tomatoes breed true. Even if that doesn’t work, it’s good to be able to buy your preferred variety again.

Planting out

Tomato seedlings on the windowsill, nearly ready to plant out.

Once the seedlings have a couple of real leaves and are 7.5-10cm high, you should either move them into a bigger pot, or plant them out into the pot they’ll eventually stay in. I prefer to replant them twice (once into a larger pot, once into their final home). The main advantage of this is that each time, you can bury a bit more of the stem. Those tiny hairs on the stem will become roots if they’re underground, giving the plant a better anchor in the earth. This is true for all nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, potatoes, etc).

Tomatoes in their second pots outside.

By the time the plant is 15cm or so tall, it’s time to replant it into its final pot. This should be at least 30cm across, and fairly deep. Tomatoes do particularly well in self-watering containers, as they need a lot of water. A self-watering container will help ensure that they don’t dry out and thus wilt. Even if you give it a drink after it’s wilted and thus revitalise it, the plant will experience a shock each time this happens, which may stunt its growth and production.

When planting out tomatoes (or any other plant), be careful with the plant’s roots as you take it out of the pot, and make sure you leave enough space in the new pot to get the roots in with plenty of room.

Another useful tip for tomatoes is to bury a little crushed eggshell underneath them when you plant them into their final container. The extra protein in the eggshell helps to feed them, and the calcium helps to prevent blossom-end rot. A quick feed when watering in after you’ve planted them out is also a good idea, and you should keep feeding regularly throughout the growing season.

Planting out a tomato plant into a selfwatering container.

You may well find that you have too many seedlings, if all of them have grown properly. It always seems a shame just to throw them away; you can try to offload them on to friends (a tomato plant is a great introduction to food growing in containers), or you can experiment with guerrilla tomato gardening!

Care and feeding

For vine tomatoes, you’ll need to provide some kind of support. Either tie the main shoot, and any other side shoots that start to sag, up with a piece of string suspended from something higher up, or go for the more traditional approach of using a cane or two, or a tomato cage. If you do use canes, put a cork or something similar on the top of them to avoid the potential of an eye injury.

Tomatoes need quite a bit of fertiliser to do well – they’re quite greedy, and regular feeding can make a big difference to the output you get. You should be feeding them every week or so during the main growing season. If you didn’t put eggshell under them when you planted them, try to use a fertiliser with some calcium in to minimise the chances of blossom-end rot.

This sideshoot just appearing is easy to pinch out. See next page.

Even more important is to keep watering the plants copiously. As long as your pots have drainage holes, it’s really pretty hard to overwater tomatoes. Insufficient water will put stress on the plants and reduce your crop; and can even lead to diseases.

This sideshoot should have been pinched out some time ago and is now as big as the other branches. See next page.

My best tomato this year was a vine variety, planted in a selfwatering container and trained up a southfacing wall.

The other thing to consider is whether you pinch them out. This is only necessary for vine varieties; bush varieties don’t need pinching out. If you leave vine (also known as ‘indeterminate’) tomato plants to their own devices, a stem will start to grow from each ‘joint’ between the main stem and it branches. These side shoots will tend to produce a lot of foliage but not so many tomatoes. If you pinch them out when they appear, the plant concentrates its energy into producing fruit, which is of course what we want.

When the plant has six or seven batches of fruit setting (these are known as trusses), pinch out the growing tip (i.e. the top of the plant, where it’s still growing upwards), to encourage it to put energy into the existing fruit. Without this, you may wind up with a lot of lower quality fruit that doesn’t ripen in time before the end of the season.

Having said that, if you’re already getting good quality fruit that’s ripening happily, you may want to experiment with letting the plant set a few more fruit, and see what happens. I’m a great fan of trying different things out to see what gives you the sort of success you want.

Courgettes

Courgettes are pretty easy to grow. They need fertiliser and quite a lot of water, but once they’re established, if you keep providing these, they can be very productive. However, if you’re only growing a single plant, or don’t have much insect life in your space (for example if you have a high-up balcony), you may have problems with pollination. This is discussed further below.

You can get courgette plants whose fruit comes in a variety of different shapes. Whilst most courgettes are the regular long sort, you can also get ball courgettes, and yellow and white varieties (my experience is that the yellow ones are less tasty, but they do look pretty).

Courgette plants come in either bush or vine type, although the majority are bushes. For growing in a pot, you want a bush type, and you should go for a reasonably compact variety. Real Seeds do a ‘Verde di Milano’ variety which is a small plant (and which I had great success with this year in the allotment, but sadly not in a container), and if you want an F1 Hybrid, try Midnight, which is compact and bushy. If you’re concerned about pollination (see below), you can also try Cavili F1, which doesn’t require pollination to set fruit. I haven’t personally tried this so can’t comment further; and being an F1 hybrid, it also has the problem that you can’t save seed from it.

Sowing

Courgettes are another vegetable that are best started off inside to give them a chance to get going as early as possible. The seeds are big enough (and the plants get large quickly enough) that you want one seed per little pot. They should take around 1-2 weeks to germinate, although I have found that sometimes they’ll take longer, particularly if it’s been a little cold (even if sown indoors). Don’t give up hope! You can speed up germination by using a propagator, or just by covering the pots in clingfilm. Be sure to take the clingfilm off once the seeds have sprouted, so that the plants can breathe.

Courgette flowers just starting to appear. You can already see that some of them have the beginnings of fruit behind them.

This courgette wasn’t fertilised, and is already starting to look a bit sorry for itself at its base.

You shouldn’t plant courgettes out until after the last frost date, as they’re very susceptible to the cold. When the plants have produced their first proper leaves, you can move them into a larger pot and start hardening them off. Then after a week or so of hardening off, plant them out into a pot at least 30cm across.

Make sure the compost is fertile and feed the plants regularly (about weekly) while they’re growing.

Fertilising courgettes for fruit

Eventually, you’ll start seeing flowers on your plants. Courgettes grow both male and female flowers on the same plant. The female flowers are the ones that produce the fruit, but they need to be fertilised by a male flower in order for the fruit to grow properly.

The male flowers are the ones that have only a stalk behind them, and the female ones have the start of a tiny fruit. Once the female flower is fertilised, the baby courgette will grow into a full-size courgette; if it doesn’t get fertilised, the baby courgette will fail to fill out properly, and eventually will rot away and fall off.

Although each plant has both male and female flowers, they can’t always self-fertilise. If you’re growing courgettes on the ground and you have several of them, insects will do the cross-fertilising for you, so there’s no need for action on your part. If you’re growing only one or two courgette plants and you’re off the ground, or otherwise don’t have many insects around the place, you may need to do the fertilisation yourself.

Wait until a female flower is open. You might need to check on them early in the morning if you have trouble finding them open, but don’t force them open, as in this case they won’t be ready to pollinate and it won’t work. Then pick a male flower, strip its petals off, and gently push it into the female flower. Alternatively, you can use a thin paintbrush or a cotton bud: dip the paintbrush into the male flower and collect a little pollen on it, then shake or dab the pollen into the female flower. If it’s a windy day, it may be worth closing the female flower up with a rubber band afterwards, to make sure that the pollen does its job.

You can either do this as soon as your female flowers start to appear, on the assumption that you’ll have problems, or wait to see if your courgettes manage to do the job by themselves. From my own experience, I’d recommend assuming that you’ll need to help the plant out if you’re growing on a balcony and if you have only a single plant. However, if you’ve grown insect attracting flowers you may be able to get away without it. Note that if the weather’s cool, you may only get male flowers at first. Be patient! The female flowers will follow in due course, and courgette plants last for quite a while, and will keep growing for as long as you keep picking the plants.

Keep an eye on your growing baby courgettes – they can go very quickly from ‘a bit too small’ to ‘enormous monsters’. Pick regularly, since picking fruit encourages the plant to produce more.

Eating courgettes

Courgettes are lovely fried quickly with a little garlic, or eaten in pasta sauce. Make sure you pick them fairly early – if you leave them a day or two too late, they suddenly turn into enormous marrow-type things and taste far less good.

You can also deep fry and eat the male courgette flowers. It’s a delicate flavour, but worth the effort at least once or twice, especially given how pretty they are. It also means that even if you have trouble getting the female flowers fertilised, you’ll get something edible from the experience.

Strawberries

This isn’t the right time of year to propagate strawberries – that should be done in July. However, if you do come across a spare strawberry plant (this year I wound up with a few rogue ones from my allotment that hadn’t been picked up in the autumn), put it into a trough or hanging basket and water it in well. You can also buy plants from garden centres at this time of year to be planted out after the first frost.

There are two basic types of strawberries: regular strawberries, of the sort you see in shops, and Alpine strawberries, which are rather closer to wild strawberries, and which are small and very intensely flavoured. Either type is perfectly amenable to being grown in a pot.

Sowing

In general, strawberries are grown from runners from established plants rather than from seeds. A friend with a strawberry patch is a good source of these, in early autumn. But Alpine or wild strawberries can be successfully grown from seed, and now is a good time of year to sow those. Either start them inside, or wait till after the first frost. If you put the seed in the freezer for a couple of weeks before sowing, it will help to jump start them.

When sowing seeds, use a seed tray with half an inch of compost, sprinkle the seeds over it, and add a light dusting of compost on top. The seeds should be covered, but not thickly. Keep the seeds moist and in direct sunlight, and expect to wait 2-3 weeks for germination.

Planting out

Once the third leaves have appeared, plant them out into larger pots. If it’s warm enough by now, you can plant them outside. A hanging basket or trough is a good pot to use, as strawberries have quite shallow roots.

Water your suckers or seedlings plentifully at first, then once the plants are established, only when the soil is dry. Fertilise monthly, and every 10 days during the growing season.

For plants grown from seed, you shouldn’t let the flowers set fruit in the first year. If you see any flowers, pick them off the plant. This makes sure that the plant is established before it produces fruit, and will mean that you get more fruit next year. Otherwise, it may wear itself out too early.

Care and cropping

Strawberries are usually ready to harvest in June. They tend to ripen over a period of time, rather than all at once, so you’ll get a few strawberries a day, rather than a large batch on one day. Happily, they’re far nicer eaten this way than the all approximately ripe boxes you buy from the supermarket!

Once the fruit start to grow, and certainly as they start to ripen, you may run into problems with slugs.

Making the Most of Your Space (Reprise)

Hopefully, you started off with a reasonable plan to make the best use of your space. However, as the pots begin to stack up at this time of year, you may find that it isn’t working out quite as you imagined. Don’t hesitate to rearrange a bit! Nothing is set in stone, and one of the advantages of growing in pots is that you can rearrange things very easily.

It can also be useful to move plants around at different stages of their life. For example, the tomato seedlings may do better up on a windowsill off the ground when they’re first planted out, whereas later on they can be moved to somewhere else. Some plants may want the most sunshine at particular points of time. Your peas will be finished cropping in late May, and you can move their pots somewhere else (and sow something else in them) and move the tomatoes up to use the vines that the peas were growing up, or sow French bean seedlings in their place instead. Experiment, and make sure that you keep notes!

Companion Planting

There are two main reasons to use flowers as companion plants: to discourage pests, and to encourage beneficial insects. Plenty of plants need insects to fertilise them; and it’s also good to encourage insects in the environment, as cities can be inhospitable to them.

Obviously, in a container garden, you have limited space, but it’s still worth giving up some of that space to flowers. Even better, you can choose flowers that have multiple uses, and that can also be eaten or used medicinally.

Marigolds

Marigolds (pot marigolds, or Calendula officinalis) are easy to grow from seed. They’re an annual, so you’ll need to resow every year, but they grow extremely easily, and given half a chance will reseed themselves. Cut off the dead flower heads as soon as they expire to encourage new growth, and you should keep getting new flowers through till the autumn. (Although if you want them to self-seed, you’ll need to leave some dead heads to go to seed, perhaps later in the season.)

Sow in March or April directly into the pot or container that you want them in, and thin to aabout 5cm apart when the seedlings appear. You can also make a late sowing at the end of August to get plants that will overwinter and flower early in the next spring.

They’re a great pest repellent, with a very strong smell. Sow them either in containers alongside your veg containers, or put a couple of seeds in the pot with plants that you’re concerned about pests on.

Marigolds are edible: the flowers and petals make a pretty garnish, and can also be used in soups, salads, and rice dishes. They’re slightly bitter, with an aromatic flavour.

They’re also medicinally useful. Research has found that calendula is an antiseptic and anti-inflammatory (thus supporting its historic use for wounds and ulcers!), and can also be used to treat some fungal infections including athlete’s foot and candida. To make up an oil, dry some flowers thoroughly (to avoid making the oil bad), put the dried flowers in a clean glass jar, and cover with olive oil or rape seed oil. Close the jar and leave in a sunny place for about three weeks. Filter the oil into another container through a muslin cloth to remove the flowers, then pour it through a funnel into a dark bottle and stopper tightly. You can apply this oil to minor wounds, varicose veins, sunburn, and other similar afflictions.

Marigold tea is recommended for a sore throat. Put a teaspoon of dried or a couple of teaspoons of fresh flowers into a teapot, pour boiling water over it, and leave to infuse for 5-10 minutes. Drink with a little honey to taste.

Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums are another self-seeding annual, and again, are easy to grow. Nasturtiums deter aphids, so sow them among your rocket and lettuce.

The leaves, flowers, and seeds of nasturtiums are all edible. The leaves taste rather like watercress – quite peppery – and can be added to salads, egg dishes, cheese dishes, and so on. You can use the flowers as an edible garnish, much like marigolds, or chop them and add them to olive oil as a pasta topping.

Nasturtium seeds can be substituted for capers, if you pick them young (when still green and soft). Put one cup of rinsed and drained nasturtium seeds into a clean 500ml jar, then bring a cup of vinegar, a teaspoon of salt, and a little pepper to the boil. Pour the vinegar, salt, and pepper into the jar over the seed pods, seal and label the jar, and leave in the fridge for 3 months before eating. You can add extra spices or herbs to the vinegar if you like (try thyme or crushed garlic).

You can also make a nasturtium vinegar which has a nice flavour. Simply add around a dozen rinsed and dried flowers to a cup of white wine vinegar in a glass jar with a screw lid, and let steep for 1-3 weeks. (Note: if the jar lid is metal, line it with plastic to avoid the vinegar discolouring it.) Strain and put into an appropriate bottle.

Lavender

Lavender repels a couple of pests, but its advantage is primarily in encouraging beneficial insects. A small pot of lavender on the edge of your balcony will act to draw insects in.

Lavender will grow from seed in the spring. Start the seeds off somewhere warm, around 6-8 weeks before your last frost date. They can take up to a month to germinate. Transplant to 5cm pots once they have a couple of sets of true leaves. Once they’re around 7.5cm tall, harden them off by leaving them outside for a little longer each day over a week, then plant them out into a pot at least 30cm big. Larger pots will lead to larger lavender.

Alternatively, you can start lavender from a cutting taken in the summer (between June and September). Pull a non-flowering side shoot off from the main stem, with a little strip of bark attached (this is where the new roots will develop). Remove enough lower leaves to give a bare stem, dip the end of the cutting into rooting hormone if you have any, and insert it into a small pot of compost. It’s a good idea to take several cuttings, to ensure that at least one takes successfully. Water in well, then cover the pot with the top of a plastic water bottle or a clear plastic sandwich bag, to keep the cuttings moist and humid. Place in a warm, shaded place, and after a couple of weeks, cut the corner of the bag off, removing it altogether after a couple more weeks. Pot the cuttings individually once they’re well-established.

Alternatively, you can take the more kamikaze attitude of just putting them into pots of compost outside, and hoping for the best. I haven’t propagated lavender this way, but I have successfully propagated mint, sage, and rosemary with minimal effort and attention. If doing this, definitely start a number of cuttings off, as it’s a bit kill-or-cure.

Cut off any flowering stems in the first season to allow the plant to gain strength.

As well as its companion plant properties, lavender also has many medicinal uses. Put dried lavender in a pillow to encourage sleep.

It can also be used in food. Lavender flowers are edible, and are nice in salads, or as part of a stew or wine-based sauce. They are nice in sweet dishes (for example, as a garnish for ice cream), or you can make lavender sugar by putting a couple of lavender flowers in a sugar container for a few weeks. Lavender’s subtle flavour is well worth experimenting with; start with a little at a time and see how you get on.

Fertiliser

As discussed on, if you’re using old compost, you’ll definitely need to feed all of your plants at least once (even Mediterranean herbs can probably use a little food). Even if you have fresh compost, most vegetables could use a little food to help produce a better crop, and if you’re growing plants like tomatoes, peppers, and courgettes, you’ll need to feed rather more often.

The basic permaculture approach to soil fertility is to add more organic matter, and that’s a good basic approach whether you’re growing in the ground or in containers. However, in containers, you don’t have any soil life generating fertility for you; you have to put it all in yourself. You’re also slightly more limited in the options you can use; green manures and dynamic accumulators (such as comfrey) are a less useful option in a limited space. (Dynamic accumulators are plants which are particularly good at mining nutrients from the soil with their roots, and which can then be used as a fertiliser. Unfortunately, they’re of little use in containers.)

Worm compost is very rich, and mixing in a little worm compost with the potting compost when you put plants in pots is a good way of feeding by adding organic matter; unfortunately, unlike in an allotment where there are worms and other creatures living in the soil, just putting extra compost on the top of the soil won’t help nutrients reach the plant roots. You’ll need to mix it in, or use liquid fertiliser. Worm tea – the liquid that comes out of the bottom of your wormery – is an excellent liquid fertiliser and great for perking up drooping seedlings.

A quick and easy liquid food option is to buy organic container plant food online or in a garden centre. However, for a cheaper and more sustainable option, you can make your own. Nettles and comfrey are both useful for feeding purposes, and you can even use the very readily available substance, human urine!

Fertilisers should contain at least one of the three major plant food elements:

You will want a fertiliser with more of one or the other depending on the time of year and the type of plant. For example, you want plenty of N for your spinach to encourage leaf growth, and for your tomatoes and peppers at the start of the season to get the stems and leaves growing; but later in the season those same tomatoes will want plenty of K to encourage fruit production. Multipurpose fertilisers have some of all three elements, which is fine.

Nettles

Nettles are usually pretty easy to find in urban parks or patches of waste ground. You want to harvest them in early to mid spring, before they flower. Be careful where you get them from: avoid areas which are very close to heavy traffic, for example, as the plants will have picked up a lot of air pollution. Don’t over-harvest: leave some nettles behind to set flowers. (Although nettles are fairly hard to get rid of, so you don’t need to be too careful.)

For fertiliser, you can pick the whole plant (for nettle soup, just use the tops of the plants). Use gloves to avoid being stung! Get about a carrier bag full of nettles, then take them home, put them into a bucket or other container with a weight on top of them, cover them with water, and cover the bucket. If it’s easier, you can use a smaller container – I used a couple of large jars. However, if using jars, don’t seal them properly, and don’t leave them in the sunshine, or the nettles will ferment a little too fast and overflow the jar.

Leave the whole thing for a couple of weeks, then fish out the nettles and dump them into the compost. Dilute the remaining nettle ‘tea’ about 1:10 with water, and water your plants. Nettle tea is high in N so is good to encourage strong leafy growth. Be careful not to get it on the leaves as it can burn them.

Be warned: it smells pretty vile. Avoid getting it on your shoes or clothes as the smell will linger for a long time!

Since it’s best to pick nettles before they flower, you may want to make a large quantity of this in the spring and keep some of it for later in the season.

Comfrey

Comfrey is a little harder to come by than nettles, but you can sometimes find it growing wild, or if you know someone with an allotment, they may be able to spare you a few leaves. It’s less painful to harvest than nettles, but it can be a bit scratchy, so again it’s best to wear gloves. Take a few leaves, or chop off the tops of the plants. Comfrey is pretty tough, so there’s little need to worry about over-harvesting, but as always with wild foraging, don’t take the whole plant.

Comfrey tea is made in much the same way as nettle tea, and unfortunately smells just about as bad. Again, after a couple of weeks of steeping the leaves in water, fish them out and put them in the compost bin, and use the comfrey tea diluted 1:10 with water to feed your plants.

A less smelly version of comfrey tea can be made by putting comfrey leaves into a black plastic container, compressing them right down (perhaps with a brick on top), and covering them. Do not add extra water; just leave them to rot down. Eventually you’ll get a thick sludgy liquid, which you can dilute and use as liquid fertiliser. Multiple applications of a weak dilution are better for the plant than a single strong application.

Comfrey tea is fairly high in K (which it extracts from deep in the soil via its long roots), so it’s good for the fruit and flower growing stage of the season.

Comfrey can be picked all through the summer, so if you can find a source of comfrey, it’s a good option to use later in the season once it’s too late for nettles.

How to stop liquid manure smelling

There are, however, ways of minimising smell. Give the mixture a stir each day to mix oxygen into the liquid. This also helps the survival of the bacteria breaking down the plants. The mixture will produce big bubbles on the surface which means the fermenting process is happening. You need to keep an eye on this as when it has finished bubbling you can strain the liquid through a net to get the majority of the plant material out. Finally, pass the liquid through an old kitchen sieve.

The fermentation process can take anything from 10 days to 3 weeks, depending on the temperature. The warmer it is, the quicker the process. To further minimise the smell, you can also put a few drops of valerian or other essential oils or a handful of rosemary and thyme into the mix.

Urine

NOTE: do not use urine if you have a urinary tract infection or similar. If you’re on significant medication or the contraceptive pill, you may also want to avoid it (over-the-counter vitamins or pills are unlikely to be problematic, especially as you’ll be applying it dilute).

Many people are a little put off by this idea, which is fair enough; and you do need to be a little careful with it. However, human urine is environmentally friendly, extremely beneficial, and safe to use on plants as it’s sterile. It’s very high in N, and a Finnish study found that it increased yields by up to 4 times. You’ll also save water by flushing the toilet that bit less often.

Dilute the urine at around 1:30 with water, and apply directly to the soil. Try to avoid getting it onto the leaves, as the high N level means that you can ‘burn’ the leaves. Avoid using urine fertiliser on food plants for a couple of weeks before harvesting, and it’s best not to use this on plants whose leaves you are harvesting on a regular basis. You’re probably OK to use it on peas or beans if you’re careful to water at the base of the plant, and you can certainly use it in the early growth stages of tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, potatoes, and so on.

Urine should be used within 24 hours if you’re putting it straight onto plants. If it’s older than this it can be added to a regular compost heap, but don’t add it to a worm compost bin.

Compost tea

If you have the time and inclination, you can make compost tea, which is one way of making a little compost go a lot further. It’s not strictly speaking a fertiliser, but a way of multiplying beneficial micro-organisms in the soil, benefiting both plants and soil. It is however a little more work than the liquid fertilisers discussed above.

You’ll need an aquarium pump and some plastic hose, some worm compost, a couple of buckets, and organic unsulfured black molasses (black treacle). The aquarium pump is used because the sort of tea that’s best is aerobic tea, with oxygen in it. This maximises the beneficial organisms, which are largely aerobic. The molasses provides food for these organisms to reproduce.

Start off with a bucket of water and run the pump and hose in it for an hour or so, to dechlorinate the water (you’ll need to weight the hose down to keep it at the bottom). Alternatively, just leave it to stand for 24 hours and stir it a few times.

Then get your second bucket, dump a few big handfuls of compost in it (don’t pack it down). Weight the hose down so it’ll stay under the compost, top the bucket up nearly to the top with your dechlorinated water, then add 2-3 big tablespoons of molasses and stir vigorously. You can also add some seaweed extract if you have it available. Then leave for 24-48 hours, with the bubblers going, to brew.

You need to use the tea as soon as it’s done aerating (certainly within 12 hours), otherwise the beneficial aerobic microorganisms will die off. Strain out the solids (and return them to the compost, or put them into your soil), and use the liquid either to revitalise the soil, or as a leaf spray.