Egypt4u

When I was looking over the piles of bags of compost at the supermarket, I was disappointed that they were all pretty much the same - general purpose, peat based.

However, yesterday one pile in a corner was labelled "General Purpose John Innes"

I was so pleased, as I wanted to compare modern peat based compost with good old fashioned J.I.

Today, the bag was resting face down before I opened it and I checked the ingredients. Contains PEAT!! The words leapt out at me. Peat in J.I. since when?

I turned the bag over and there were the words in very large letters:

GENERAL PURPOSE
Contains
JOHN INNES


I had missed the tiny "contains" between the two lines.
As J.I. is a set of complete formulae for different kinds of needs, so what is the point of adding it to another mix? It immediately stops being the formula.

My fault I know, I should have looked closer in this day and age.

Its the usual supermarket sales ploy, as you say it could be a 10 tonne pile of peat and someone throws a handful of JI onto it and that would make it legal to claim "contains John Innes"

Kinda lots me at "John Innes" ????

LLL, John Innes is a well known UK supplier of plant growing materials and famous for the fact that they are mostly soil, loam and grit based and containing very little peat. They are available in various numbers to identify what they are best used for such as John Innes No1 which is most suitable for young plants.

Ohhhhhhh geez - that would be really nice to have. I don't think we have anything like that here. We can get specific mixes ie. cactus, African violet etc but mostly our general mixes divide into 2 categories: inside tropical and outside. The outside mixes usually have slow release fertilizer mixed into them for hanging baskets. The other outside mix is called 'topsoil' but is more a mix you'd put onto your lawn for growing grass.

Mostly our stores sell peat packed in bales. Smaller packed bags of vermiculite, perlite and then other bags of compost: mushroom, steer, chicken, lamb.