Where to dispose of old earth/compost from large garden pots?

[Allshallbewell2021]

We have a relatively small garden and nowhere to dump old compost.
Do you put it in your general bin, in your garden waste bin (a bit at a time) or bag it and shlepp it to the tip?

My late dad used to spread it over his lawn. You'd be surprised how litter a pot full covers.

I tip it into the flower beds.

I'm interested in how it affects the lawn @LocSeeTan. Did it improve it? Ours is rather uneven.

Tip it into flower beds. Why would you put useful soil in the bin or take it to the tip?

If you don't have flower beds, stick it in a sack and advertise for free collection. People will want it.

I put it on my flower beds

I have a container garden, no lawn and put old compost in the garden waste bin a bit at a time.

Thank you, that's interesting,sh who is a garden amateur hates me dropping new compost on the grass as if it's going to die underneath- I always say - it's fine! He would be baffled if I did that.
We don't have many beds and one box bed is full of all my old pot soil.
But thanks, I will try and do that.
People want old compost? Fascinating, I know so little.
Do you empty a pot completely or do you just add 50 % fresh compost?

Why do you want to? Unless you have been doing something very weird , compost is compost, like soil is ….soil. Tip it out , check for pests ( if there are vine weevils it should be the bonfire, although the birds might eat them if you spread it out. Ants can be controlled with ant powder.

If it is very compacted, add some fine grit or grit sand. Then put in some chemopak compost base ( that’s the nourishing part) you can get it in any garden centre. We often ad a few trowel of sterilised topsoil for texture, as well. Mix it all up and put it back.

now we don’t have peat, modern compost is quite literally rubbish. You are better hanging on to what you have

Compost is normally spread about among the flower beds to improve the soil texture there. However, I have also scattered it on the lawn. Last year I dug a pond then sieved the soil and spread that out on our tiny front lawn. A whole pond's worth and you could barely tell it was there after a couple of weeks when the grass had grown up a bit.

We just spread it out evenly and raked it gently to help it settle between the grass blades rather than sit on top of them, if that makes sense?

If I was reusing a large pot then, yes, I would also aim to reuse about 50% of it when I repotted. The rest topped with fresh compost, manure etc.

Totally agree!

The idea that some people see compost as single use/disposable is baffling to me.

And yes, people will want compost. We re-landscaped a bit of our garden a while back, by hand, and ended up with about a dustbin full of spare topsoil. Neighbours were more than happy to take most of it off us.

I tip it onto the borders in my garden and I also reuse it in pots too. I just add a bit of blood fish and bone to it to ginger the used compost up a bit and if I have a bag of new compost, add a bit of that to it too.

I would never bin it, it's too useful.

Thank you all, such great advice!

I rent, so all my gardening is in containers, and there are very few places to spread old compost. What I do is use a bokashi system for my veggie peelings, and have a 'soil factory' going - I let that revive the compost from old pots, to use again.

Spread it thinly over the lawn. My DH buys tonnes of top soil every year which he mixes with sand - it gets spread over the lawn to fill any uneven bits and the grass just grows through it.

Definitely don’t put it in your bin as other gardeners would love it! If you know anyone who makes compost give it to them or just put outside house as free to taker. I garden on mostly rock (hard work) so have to constantly add organic matter and love it when neighbours empty their old pots here. I also reuse half of old soil mixed with new which will save you £.

Definitely not garden waste, approved method is the soil/hard core bin at the tip, which our Council, like many others, charges £5 a bag for.

I tip mine into garden waste.

By the time I’m chucking it out most of the plants are completely pot bound and it comes out in a sold lump the shape of the pot!

Do others gardeners really want that?

Don't throw it in the bin! Soil takes thousands of years to form, but is being washed away/degraded very fast - so much so that we only have about 50 years of cultivatable soil left.

Crumble your old soil into your garden, offer it free to others, or scatter in a park or woodland.

I stick old roots/woody bits mixed up with the soil through a shredder, then into my compost bin. Or put the shredded matter straight onto my soil as mulch.

Fertile soil is such a precious resource - its really important not to waste it.

Add seaweed feed to ‘spent’ compost 👍🏿☘️

For perennials in pots, I take out the top few inches and top dress with fresh compost, or lift the whole thing out and brush off some compost all around the roots, add fresh and firm it in. I don’t replace that much. The spent compost goes into our compost bin with garden and food waste or on the flower beds.

Mine is the same. I wouldn't be disposing of it otherwise. It's just a plant pot shaped mass of dried roots. Is this of use to other gardeners?

The mass of old roots question: I would typically pop a mass like this in a quiet/hidden area of the garden to break down (e.g. underneath a shrub or behind a trellis). Depending on the plant, of course - but many won't survive their roots being exposed like that so I rarely get problems with things I don't want regrowing.

Normally a few months later I stomp on on when I'm doing something else and spot it, it then just crumbles into the soil bed.

So it's not strictly useful but it does make sure it's not wasted and any nutrients and fibres in the root mass are returned to the soil.

I've got a constant recycyling system going on where old compost gets mixed with a bit of new, home made, leaf mould and a bit of blood fish and bone and reused. It gets a bit complicated and every so often. Any left over is soil improver. I have a lot of pots and not much garden so I do know what you mean.

Thank you so much for this advice