A great compost supports your plants to grow quickly and healthily, but a poor one will leave them struggling to survive.
The government has announced that peat composts will be banned from sale through retail outlets in 2024, so finding a good peat-free alternative is more important than ever. Which? Gardening magazine knows that some gardeners struggle to find good peat-free composts that work for them, so this year we only trialled peat-free composts so we could be sure to find the best ones.
Go straight to our compost results to find the Best Buys.
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The best compost
Seeds can be tricky to germinate and grow on and we know that peat-free composts often aren't the easiest to use. So Which? Gardening tested 18 composts for sowing seeds and compared them against a professional peat compost to see how well they fared.
The top scoring peat-free compost was as good as the professional peat and two more were almost as good.
We grew tomatoes and petunias, which have different requirements. The tomatoes need a well-drained compost that has enough feed to get them growing fast. The petunias can be trickier to grow and need a fine-textured compost that will support their delicate roots.
Seedlings and plug plants, which are small but already have a good root system, need a compost that will fuel their growth.
In our trial of composts for young plants we found four composts that were good enough to be Best Buys and three more that were recommended.
We grew tomato plants and marigolds in 18 composts. We saw a staggering difference between the best and worst plants.
Care for your plants in a Best Buy pop up greenhouse
How to grow the best seedlings
Compost experts have told us that the best way to grow your seedlings in peat-free compost is to feed them as soon as they have developed their first true leaves. We wanted to know if this was good advice and also to find out how much feed you should use.
So we sowed petunia and tomato seeds in four different composts and then fed each compost in several different ways. We concentrated on different ratios and frequencies of watering with a liquid feed, but also tried controlled-release feed. Of course didn't feed one set of plants to we could see how much good the extra feed did. We had expected that the highest doses of feed would prove too much for some plants, but this wasn't the case.
We found that the recommended dose for young plants of one of our Best Buy liquid feeds, applied once a week, gave excellent results. A Best Buy controlled-release feed was as good, so if you prefer to save yourself the trouble of remembering weekly feeds, this is a good alternative.
For more tips and tricks, read our expert guide to peat-free compost.
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