Originally Posted by George.com

"Jackie D" wrote in message
...

I'm being greedy by posting twice for different reasons. Hope this is
ok.

My camelia caught a disease and died. Following advice I recevied from
my garden centre, I cleansed the soil with diluted Jeyes fluid. A while
later I moved a pot containing a handsome acer to that very spot. Then
that died within a very short period of time. I am now thinking the
soil in the pot is infected also.

I would like to re-use the pot but would I need to cleanse the soil?
Get rid of the soil and cleanse the pot? Throw the pot away and buy a
new one?

if the soil is simply in the pot then you can dispose of it somewhere at the
back of your garden where it will not pose a danger to other plants. After a
month or more of weathering I would imagine, and this is only my intuition,
the jeyes fluid will be leached out of the soil to a degree where it can be
added back into an active compost heap and restored. If the soil is actually
in the garden you may have to dig it all out and stand it for a period in a
back part of the garden and then compost it.

Another perhaps simplier solution is to dig in a good quantity of compost in
to the infected area and the soil goodies should deal to the Jeyes over
time. Below is some advice gleaned from FAQ -- rec.gardens.ecosystems.

B.02.12: What's the best way to deal with degraded or corrupted soils that
seem beyond repair?
The best way to know the extent of damage to the soil is to have the soil
tested. The best way to tell when the damage has been corrected is to have
the soil tested again. Soil organisms have the capacity to clean up just
about everything including toxic waste. (See B.03.04 on Bio-remediation.)
They do, however, work by their own schedule and clean-up of seriously
corrupted soils may take several years. In those situations where the damage
is limited to a relatively small area and there is no good way to garden
around it, it may be more realistic to simply dig out the problem soil and
to replace it with a good garden loam. In most cases however, the problem
soil can be cleansed by simply digging in an abundance of well composted
organic material, keeping the site well watered and giving the soil
organisms the time to do the job. The extra organic material and the extra
water are to help build stronger populations of the soil organisms.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rge/faq-html/...b.htm#B.02.10:

As for the pot, I guess gove it a good wash with clean water and the Jeyes
residue will be sufficiently diluted. The rule of thumb for washing out agri
chemical containers is rinse 3 times and drip dry at least 30 seconds.

rob