Most cost effective way to make an acid border

Sulphur chips.

Sulphur Chips - £0.00 : Garden Direct, Weed Killers, Fertilisers, Garden Compost Products, Garden Fertilizers, Wood Treatment, Cuprinol Sprayer, Moss Killer

I've actually bought this from gardencentres that stock Chempak products.

 

The whole idea sounds rather pointless, to be honest. You have a perfectly decent soil, suitable for growing a wide range of plants, yet you want to waste both money and natural resources on removing it and replacing it with ericaceous compost just so you can grow a few shrubs. Why not just grow plants suitable for the soil you've got?

 

Clueless, your cheapest, and easiest, option is using Flowers of Sulphur. It should be available at your local chemists.

 

I'm not sure Boots or Lloyds, are likely to stock flowers of sulphur by the kilo?

 

If not a kilo, certainly a half kilo.

 

Thanks again, all. Top advice as usual.

No natural resources will be going to waste. There are plenty of places in my garden where the soil is still the completely depleted soil it was when I moved in. The good soil that would be excavated (by hand of course) would just be deployed elsewhere in the garden.

What would be the fun in that? By extension, why bother growing anything at all? After all, mother nature wont let the land go to waste. I could have it full of dandelions and docks and I wouldn't have to do any work at all.

I may well do that, and to be honest I'm starting to think its going to be the most logical solution. The shrubs I want in there all prefer acid soil, but to varying degrees, and as we all know, pH is only one of many factors. I'm warming to the idea that if I tried to make a bed that suited everything, I'd end up getting it right for some at the expense of others (you can please some of the plants some of the time, but you can't please all of the plants all of the time).

 

If you grow in containers you will have to feed and water constantly over the summer, by growing in the actual bed, you cut down the plants dependacy regarding feed and water, upon you.

I've never thought of sunken containers as a long term solution for medium to large shrubs.

I know acifying the soil is an ongoing process, but its not that difficult once you set the ball rolling.

 

Evening all.

Once again thanks for all the advice and opinions, you've helped me formulate my plan.

For the short term, I'm not going to go for the full acid bed. The main reason being that after doing a bit of research about the plants I want to grow, there's only the blueberries that are really fussy. While the others, currents and such like prefer acid conditions, RHS reckons neutral is ok, or ideally around ph6.7 which is much more easily achievable.

For the blueberries, I have bought two massive oval rubber bag things. They were on offer at B&Q for a fiver each. This is them:

Keter Oval Flexi Tub 43L Blue |

My plan is to make some drainage holes in the bottom, fill them with ericaceous compost, and put one young blueberry bush in each. Short term I'll just set them on the ground, but once I've decided upon their final position, I'll just sink the whole tub into the ground.

I guess an advantage of this plan is that if I misjudge the space requirements, I can just move the blueberries without disturbing them too much.

 

Flowers of Sulphur 2.5Kg Yellow Sulphur Garden/Animals | eBay

Found this on fleebay.