A Potted History
Fertile Fibre is not the brainchild of a marketing team backed by a massive research department. So how did it all start?
Tenbury Wells farmer Rob Hurst and wife Kim run The Cottage Herbery, specialising in organically grown herbs, aromatics and cottage garden plants. You’ve probably met them selling their plants at flower shows around the country – www.thecottageherbery.co.uk. They are passionately concerned about environmental matters and long before the destruction of the peat bogs became a popular cause, were creating their own compost.
One of Rob’s farm crops was hops. The waste left after harvesting – a mixture of leaves, stems and the coir string used to support the hops – was composted for use in the nursery. Says Rob:"We realised that our string composted very well indeed and we had heard about coir being used for composting in countries where peat is unknown. It is widely popular in the USA, Australia and the Far East and I wondered if this could be developed for our own use." This was in 1990, and after considerable research he located a source of supply in Sri Lanka, and for his experiments took his first delivery of two sacks of coir in a Heathrow Airport car park.
The next stage was to ensure that the compost would be accepted to organic standards, and meet the stringent requirements of the Soil Association. This required locating coir grown to accredited organic standards. That done, Rob started buying coir by the container load.
His friend, the great Geoff Hamilton – renowned as Britain’s favourite gardener through his work for the BBC on TV and radio – provided wonderful advice in the development of Rob’s growing media / compost mixes and the result is the formulation for today’s Fertile Fibre range of multipurpose, potting and seed composts.
Although Fertile Fibre was initially intended for their own use, friends asked for some of Rob’s ‘magic brown compost’ and a business grew successfully from recommendation.