How To Fertilise

Hi, I'm Mike and I'm here at Camden Garden Centre, and I'm going to give you some gardening advice. I've dug a hole here for a rosebush I'm going to be planting. You need to dig the hole deep, and then back there I've added some manure to this soil.

And what's a base dressing is: it's something that goes at the base of the plant, so it's something that goes at the bottom of that hole. So that's the right planting depth for this particular plant. And what I'm going to use as a base dressing is Bone Meal, which is a very long-lasting fertiliser that encourages good root formation, and that's what you want when you're first planting a perennial like a rose.

Don't need a lot, sprinkle that on the bottom - and then mix it in, because you don't want the plant roots to come in direct contact with the Bone Meal, otherwise it'll scorch. And that is the application of a base fertilizer. And now the application of a top dressing.

Just to show you, what I'm using here is the fertilizer we've had since Second World War, called Growmore. It's a very simple, very cheap, easy to apply fertilizer. And it's a balanced fertilizer, so it gives most plants what they need.

And if you read the instructions on the bottom, it says spread 70g per square meter, and if you've not done this before it may be worth using a weighing scale just to get an approximate idea of how much to use. Now the area I'm treating is this small area down here, and this is only about half a square meter, so I only want to put on half of that amount. So at 70g per square meter, at half a square meter, that's 35g that we need.

So here's a weighing scale, here you go, approximately 35g, and all you simply do, is spread that evenly over the soil. And that's it, couldn't be simpler. That's the application of a top dressing.
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